Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Since the former 'gold standard' Samsung 850 drives have become discontinued and the 860's apparently taking their place - how's the longevity looking at them? Speed I don't care so much about so I don't want to hear about nvme drives; these are going to be internals for my cheesegrater with a 2TB on an OWC pcie card for my samples. When I purchased the h/w for moving my boot ssd to the pcie card I ordered a second adapter card for future expansion possibilities but not the drive.

In doing recent research I've come across a Sonnetech card that will mount 2 ssd's on one card and said card also has external esata ports on the back. It's a full length card. Has anyone used one of these and what's your experience with it? I don't really need the esata ports but they're nice to have though. I would leave the 850 EVO that's my boot drive on the card it's on now and populate the Sonnetech with two more ssd's.

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Buehler?
Buehler?

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

The silence is deafening:-) Curious myself as well:o

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Where is Darryl Ramm when you need him :D

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Exactly. One of the reasons I asked about the Sonnetech card is according to something I read in their specs that throughput goes way high when two cards are used. They don't say if it's some kind of RAID setup or what. But having two ssd's in once pcie slot is very welcoming. A pair of 2 TB 860's is cheaper than a single 4 TB 860.

Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Generally speaking the bandwidth is there for PCIE to run 2 Hard drives.

I don’t know the specs but PCIE is massive and can handle it.

I don’t know specifics about the sontech or how it’s designed but if they’re any good with their design it should be fine. - you should still ping Sontech and ask them specifics

PS. NVME drives rock [emoji450]

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Yeah nvme drives ARE fast but you have to be careful with the heatsinking on them. I understand they are finicky that way and can generate a lot of heat.


Yeah the bandwidth may be there but specifically with the Sonnetch they say the throughput is faster with two drives on the card. Yet they don't say if this is some kind of RAID or what and that's what I'm looking at. Don't need/want RAID.

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

From my 9/21/2017 post:

2009 Mac Pro 6-core 3.47 (4,1 flashed to 5,1):

Seagate Constellation 1TB spinner: Write 169.4, read 153.3
Hitachi 1TB spinner: Write 128.1, 132 read
Vertex 4 128 GB SATA III 6Gbs (in a SATA II drive bay): Write 258.2, read 262.1
Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB in a PCIe slot (in an OWC Accelsior adapter): Write 501.6, read 516.4

2010 Mac Pro 12-core 2.6 (stock 5,1):

Seagate "Hybrid" spinner 2TB 7200 rpm (larger than normal cache, see below*): Write 180, read 208
Western Digital "Black" 1TB 7200 rpm: Write 171.9, read 173.7
Apple SSD 512GB (original boot drive) Write 155.4, read 217.2
Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB (in a SATA II drive bay) Write 257.1, read 270.0

Tests were with the Blackmagic Design drive test.

I initially considered adding a Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card into a slot, and connecting one to four G-Technology ev512 GB SSD external drives (there are two Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 add-on cards, the "Pro" has separate controllers for each of the four USB 3.0 ports). But I bought the newer Allegro USB-C PCIe card for my MP 3.47 GHz tower instead. (The tower has an Avid Native card and the Accelsior card, but still has an available slot.) The Sonnet card supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds up to 10 Gbps. It uses two lanes in a PCIe 2.0 MB (instead of one lane in a PCIe 3.0 MB), so is capable of full bandwidth.

FYI: 1,800 MB/s = 14.4 Gbps

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

The Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus (what a mouthfull) is a dual SATA adapter, no hardware raid, just JBOD, but you can use software raid on a Mac with it, which is where all claims of faster bandwidth with this adapter come from. But I would avoid RAID with SSDs. It’s 4 x PCIe 2.0 so being in a cheesegrater that only have PCIe 2.0 slots is not an issue.... and SATA is the real limit anyhow.

Everything here is significantly constrained by the SATA interfaces. Good modern native PCIe SSDs are obviously much faster but the issue then becomes only PCIe/AHCI SSDs are bootable on a cheese grater and PCIe/NVMe SSDs are not.

The 860 Evo will be as limited by SATA as the 850 Evo was. I have not heard of anything bad about the 860 Evo. Anandtech have only reviewed the 860 Pro AFAIK. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12348...4tb-ssd-review.

I have no more insight, the main SATA SSDs I use now are Samsung T5 external USB drives, everything else is NVMe (mostly internal MacBook Pro, and I don’t have a cheese grater).

Re: Samsung 860 EVO ssd's
 

Have yet to try a T5 drive, but as I recall the specs are very good.

I did compare the G-Drive Slim (external USC-C [USB 3.1 Gen 2]) to see if the Sonnet USB-C PCIe card (also USB 3.1 Gen 2 with USB-C connectors) in a flashed 2009 3.5 GHz hexcore tower gave equivalent performance to the TB3 built-in ports on my 2016 MBP 15" 2.7 GHz 4-core.

Results were identical: write speed hovered around 300 MBs and read speed hovered around 525. Both results were slightly higher (< +/- 5MBs) in the 2009 tower.

So the 860 in a PCIe card will give you much better write speeds, but read speed can be achieved with an external USB-C solid state drive -- which also adds current USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 2) technology to the old towers with only USB 2.0.