New Samsung 850 Evo

[Darryl Ramm]

The Samsung 850 Pro has been ultra impressive with it's leading SATA III SSD performance but is a little bit pricy for some folks. Samsung just released a less expensive 850 Evo with slightly lower but still very impressive performance and a more affordable price point. MSRP is $500 for 1TB (around $150 less than a street price on the 850 Pro 1TB).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/s...850-evo-review

The review mentions a non-released 2TB model, I'd certainly look forward to that since I can barely fit a boot/system into 1TB because of lots of developer tools and other junk but similarly for folks with large sample libraries that might be really nice.

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And if you have the previous generation Samsung 840 Evo make sure you update the firmware to fix a read performance bug, and read more about that bug online, you may need to run an additional repair to restore performance.

When you install any SSD make sure it is running the latest firmware, and check periodically it is up to date, these things carry around such incredibly complex software nowadays.

All Samsung SSD software/updates are here... http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...downloads.html

[Southsidemusic]

Thank you adarryl for the post!

Downloading now as we have quite a few Samsung SSD's here. Where I sit right now typing I can see 6 x 850 Pro and 4 x 840 Pro and 2 x 840 EVO so time to connect them one at a time and run the updates

Damn thats a lot of dollars sitting there 70-75% filled up. Should probably move all those files to a few 2TB spinners and start re-using the SSD's for recording again instead of buying new ones, we have only used them for recording sessions and max 1 week each

[Darryl Ramm]

And I know you will but for everybody else, always make sure you have backups before applying firmware updates, they should be fine, but...

I would also love Samsung to get their nice SSD Magician Software onto OS X. I expect they just don't see anywhere near the demand as on Windows since so many Mac's are closed boxes.

[Southsidemusic]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

And I know you will but for everybody else, always make sure you have backups before applying firmware updates, they should be fine, but...

I would also love Samsung to get their nice SSD Magician Software onto OS X. I expect they just don't see anywhere near the demand as on Windows since so many Mac's are closed boxes.

Great thinking

Backup the backups as it will pay off one day when we have a double failiure.

Thanks Darryl
Christopher

PS. Do you recommend starting to buy into larger SSD's now as I read that the smaller ones were faster a while back. We have so many of them just because we always bought the 256GB ones and not the 512 or larger as I thought the smaller ones were better but I suspect that has changed since we got all these smaller 256GB drives.

[Bill Denton]

@Darryl Ramm...

Have you done/seen any comparisons between the 840's and 850's or the 850 Pros vs 850 Evos?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Southsidemusic

Great thinking

Backup the backups as it will pay off one day when we have a double failiure.

Thanks Darryl
Christopher

PS. Do you recommend starting to buy into larger SSD's now as I read that the smaller ones were faster a while back. We have so many of them just because we always bought the 256GB ones and not the 512 or larger as I thought the smaller ones were better but I suspect that has changed since we got all these smaller 256GB drives.

Ah generally the smaller SSDs were *not* faster in the past, they just don't have enough internal 'fan-out' of NAND flash chips to be able to deliver the same high sustained IO rates as the larger drives (and there are likely other more complex effects as well). That's why I've generally recommended avoiding the smallest two sizes of Samsung drives and I'd stick with that recommendation with the 850 Evo. You can see some of those effects in the Anadtech review of the 850 Evo, even if for many uses with Pro Tools folks won't get anywhere near the performance capabilities of these drives... and if you use timeline cache you'll likely care even less.

[Southsidemusic]

So basically it's a go to get the larger ssd's and not have to worry about any performance issues compared to the 256's we already have?

We have accumilated quite a few 256's now and it would be sweet to start using the larger 1TB SSD's even though they are more expensive at initial purchase but per GB it's a much better price.

Thanks soo much Darryl for your always very informative information
Greatly appreciated

Best Regards
Christopher

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

@Darryl Ramm...

Have you done/seen any comparisons between the 840's and 850's or the 850 Pros vs 850 Evos?

AFAIK nobody has an 850 Evo in the wild except it seems a few product reviewers.

I've run 830, 840 Pro, 840 Evo and played with an 850 Pro. Anandtech has all these drives reviewed and benchmarked. I just cannot fault Anadtech's reviews in any way, and they are better than I'd do in any tests (with the exception of actually running Pro Tools on the drive).

I'm needing boot disk space so the next one I'll buy can be either a 850 Pro or Evo @ 2TB, whatever they want to release first (and I expect that will be the 850 Evo as it's TLC + VNAND technology in the Evo gives them much better density than the MLC + VNAND in the Pro, but maybe there are marketing reasons to ship the higher priced/higher performing one first).

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Southsidemusic

So basically it's a go to get the larger ssd's and not have to worry about any performance issues compared to the 256's we already have?

We have accumilated quite a few 256's now and it would be sweet to start using the larger 1TB SSD's even though they are more expensive at initial purchase but per GB it's a much better price.

Thanks soo much Darryl for your always very informative information
Greatly appreciated

Best Regards
Christopher

Absolutely. And the larger drives tend to be less of an issue with sustained write speed, and drive wear, as the same level of overprovisioning (7% by default but I'd bump to 20% for any drive being written to much) gives you a larger reserve of spare/free pages on the larger drives.

Obviously but we are talking about single drive performance comparison here. If you have a system with multiple things happening at once or if you round-robin onto the seperate smaller SSDs you may be be able to get greater performance than with a single larger SSD.

And... for folks with older Mac Pros... the internal SATA is only SATA II/3 Gbps, these modern SATA SSDs can saturate a SATA III/6 Gbps link, so stick a third party SATA III PCIe card in your Mac.

[Southsidemusic]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Absolutely. And the larger drives tend to be less of an issue with sustained write speed, and drive wear, as the same level of overprovisioning (7% by default but I'd bump to 20% for any drive being written to much) gives you a larger reserve of spare/free pages on the larger drives.

Obviously but we are talking about single drive performance comparison here. If you have a system with multiple things happening at once or if you round-robin onto the seperate smaller SSDs you may be be able to get greater performance than with a single larger SSD.

And... for folks with older Mac Pros... the internal SATA is only SATA II/3 Gbps, these modern SATA SSDs can saturate a SATA III/6 Gbps link, so stick a third party SATA III PCIe card in your Mac.

Super

Thank You for the great advice and great input here Darryl

Gonna order a few 1TB Samsungs and start using larger drives from now on.

Christopher