Samsung 840 250GB TLC SSD

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The folks at Hardware.Info are taking a somewhat different approach to their review of the Samsung 840 250GB TLC SSD. The plan is to run the drive until it fails to see just how long it takes to give up the ghost. You can see our evaluation here for comparison purposes.

That is exactly what Hardware.Info will be doing for the next weeks or months: however long it takes, we will find out how many times you can write to an SSD 840 before it calls it a day. We took two Samsung SSD 840 250GB SSDs, filled them to half capacity in order to mimick real-life use, and started writing to them last night. This writing test will continue without interruption until both SSDs fail. Anyone can check out the progress using our live video stream to see how the drives are holding up.
Click to expand...
 
Gonna be following this, can't wait to see how long it actually takes. I'm still debating if I'm going to do an SSD or a regular HDD for my next system, but I highly doubt that this test will be done before that (as of today, I'm ordering the case/mobo Thursday). If these results impress me, I might spring for an SSD (Samsung 840 Pro 256GB).

EDIT: I understand this is TLC vs MLC.
 
Watching it on a feed.... that'll be fun.

Surely this will take months. I've had one SSD fail on me in about 5 years of having them so taking a sample size of two seems to risk that they just don't fail.
 
We should set up a betting pool and make bets on when they will fail. What do you guys think?
 
I'm down, and but I got a feeling that this will be a long term betting pool.
 
The feed shows a projected failure date, or at least 0% health date of November.
 
Well it will fail for sure, it's how SSDs work.

BTW, did anybody try similar tests with consumer HDDs ? Hammering one 24/7 to see what happens ?
 
If they really wanted a SSD to fail, they should have picked up an OCZ... ;)
 
I expect that for HDDs the bearings will fail before the media will get structural problems. They commonly use lifetime greasing, which will also fail after a certain peroid.
 
Well many people have been running HDDs for 5 years or more without most of them failing. If you hammer the drives I guess the bearings could experience more vibrations but that's it. However the heads would work far more than in mostly idle drives, especially if the hammering is random. I'd expect that motor or related components to fail first.
 
The test is still going. 2500 writes per cell. Still no errors. Over 811,600 GB written so far. Glad I picked up the 840. The difference between a physical drive, another SSD and this SSD was enough for me to be happy enough with using my Chromebook in place of my desktop for 90% of my usual PC use.
 
Hrm, they have the drives reporting 1% health. I wonder what is triggering that reading...
 
Modred189 said:
Hrm, they have the drives reporting 1% health. I wonder what is triggering that reading...
Click to expand...

Each cell is only rated for 1000 writes. The health dropped to 1% upon reaching that metric. Writes have exceeded 2500 per cell with no errors.
 
Spoke one day too soon.

First write error (bad sector) occurred after 2945 writes to that cell, first unreadable block occurred after 3187 writes to that cell.

Three times the rated life of the SSD.

First moved (bad sector) on the 2nd SSD occurred after 3152 writes.
 
It's simply amazing. 779,538 GB written to TLC nand before a single bad sector was reported. With write amplification factored in, this gives the SSD around a 66 year life span @ 10GB/day of written data. I think what this goes to show you is that something else on the SSD (PCB) will fail before the nand itself fails.

I'd love if these guys took a high end consumer grade HDD and put it through the same test.
 
Very nice. I've installed many Samsung TLC drives in people's computers. I haven't had a single complaint or problem yet. I've also been monitoring the usage of my customers and none are coming anywhere near 10GB/day either.
 
I grabbed a Samsung 840 SSD that was on sale on the strength of this test alone... stuck it in my modest Chromebook and got a nice bump in performance. In the end, it's actually a pretty decent SSD.
 
a Korean site did the same with 128GB version of 840.

http://www.playwares.com/xe/28285283

took 3 drives and came up with the following:

total written/time
391TB(took 164 days)
319TB(took 134 days)
309TB(took 135 days)

and then they died..

Just as a comparison they took a 830(120GB) and started the same test same day.

It was 350TB written and still going strong.
 
Last edited:
DizzySHK said:
a Korean site did the same with 128GB version of 840.

http://www.playwares.com/xe/28285283

took 3 drives and came up with the following:

total written/time
391TB(took 164 days)
319TB(took 134 days)
309TB(took 135 days)

and then they died..
Click to expand...
Which goes to show you that SSD size has a direct relationship with it's durability because of wear leveling. Doubling the size also doubles its lifetime.
 
bigdogchris said:
Which goes to show you that SSD size has a direct relationship with it's durability because of wear leveling. Doubling the size also doubles its lifetime.
Click to expand...

Wear leveling still occurs at the same rate. It doubles the lifetime because it has twice as many cells to wear out.

Still very much a case of one minute per mile, two miles taking two minutes.
 
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