Samsung 840 Series TLC 250GB SSD

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
The torture test of the Samsung 840 Series TLC 250GB SSD continues today over at Hardware.Info. The crew has been beating on this drive for a few weeks now to see just what it is made of and, so far, it is doing pretty good. You can see our evaluation of this drive here.

The continuous test of the Samsung 840 SSDs has been running for two weeks and one day. A week ago the Wear Level indicator had gone down to 59, and now it's at 16. That means that we have used up the majority of the official lifespan of the SSD. At some point next week we'll arrive at 0. It will be interesting to see how long the SSD will keep working after the end of its official life.
 
Why are people so obsessed with wear level than data consistency with SSDs? Is it because it's harder to benchmark?
 
these tests seem meanigless since they dont test data retention time when the cells have some wear on them, an ssd isnt much use if the data goes bye bye after a few days of it being switched off.
 
these tests seem meanigless since they dont test data retention time when the cells have some wear on them, an ssd isnt much use if the data goes bye bye after a few days of it being switched off.
Because to test that kind of thing takes years, and by the time you can prove a SSD has decent data retention we won't care because we'll be saving on crystals and shit. What we can do is abuse the fuck out of the SSDs and wreck them as fast as possible and see just how much abuse they can take. If X drive can sustain Y petabytes of writes before failing and I only write Z TB a month to it then I can see that it will last Y/Z months which is longer than I'll be alive therefore I don't have to go to [H] forums and make another retarded thread asking if I should just put nothing on the SSD I just paid $400 bucks for because I think my few GB worth of writes a day is super hardcore and will cause my shiny new drive to evaporate into dust in a week or two.
 
This article uses an entirely new definition of WAF. I typically try to keep WAF as high as possible. The Samsung 840 has a pretty good rating so far.
 
I have 2 840 128GB in RAID 0 and the write performance sucks.

I bought these to upgrade from 2x128GB OCZ Agility 4s that were in RAID 0 but the write speed is much worse.

Not impressed with these. If I could return them I would
 
Generally it is not a good idea to buy an SSD below 256/240 GB or if you really care about speed. Those usually are not able to utilize the maximum parallelism of the controller. Further, the non-pro 840 is not best suited for write-heavy tasks. In short you possibly would have been better off with a single 128 GB 840 Pro drive.
 
I have 2 840 128GB in RAID 0 and the write performance sucks.

I bought these to upgrade from 2x128GB OCZ Agility 4s that were in RAID 0 but the write speed is much worse.

Not impressed with these. If I could return them I would
If you don't have a 7 series motherboard then you are not TRIMing your SSD's in RAID, thus the writes are going to be much slower than it should. Your disk latency in performance monitor for writes is probably pretty high too.
 
If you don't have a 7 series motherboard then you are not TRIMing your SSD's in RAID, thus the writes are going to be much slower than it should. Your disk latency in performance monitor for writes is probably pretty high too.

^Took the words right out of my mouth :eek:

I have an HP P410 PCIe RAID Controller in my rig (Don't ask) and screamed when my 3 x Intel 520's running RAID-5 did not perform as expected. Latency was WAY low, but R/W times sucked... Long story short, I finally got ahold of HP Firmware that introduced TRIM and proper defrag that boosted performance by 35% overall. Higher than a single drive, but still less than the 600MB/s I was hoping.

The following tipped me off on things.
 
Last edited:
If you don't have a 7 series motherboard then you are not TRIMing your SSD's in RAID, thus the writes are going to be much slower than it should. Your disk latency in performance monitor for writes is probably pretty high too.

I have 7 series motherboard but that isn't the problem.



The problem I am having is I didn't realize the OCZ Agility 4 SSDs that I had in RAID 0 were so fast at writing. The OCZ's Agility 4 in RAID 0 haver over double the write speed.

I guess it's my fault for not paying close attention to the write speeds on the SAmsung 840s. Reading speed is very fast.


The Agility 4s are faster over all.
 
I bought this drive along with a new trinity laptop in late march. I get over 4 hours of casual web surfing on battery power, and when plugged in Windows 8 takes about 20 seconds to load. I blindly trusted Samsung to not be producing a "bad product" and the TLC pricing brought it into my budget. I am very interested to see how long this drive lasts.


samsung840magicianacerv.jpg
 
Well as long as you have backups of your important data, trust is fine.
 
Well as long as you have backups of your important data, trust is fine.

What is funny about that is the question I have here: My "important" backups are scans of my birth certificate and the like that I have saved in multiple physical locations. Like everyone else though I have a gig or two of things that would be either very inconvenient or practically impossible to retrieve.

When I was reading the comment section of this torture test, readers mention leaving an SSD in a powered off state for a long period of time and that leading to data loss. Is this the way this drive wears?
 
No that's not wear that's just the fact that one state (0 or 1) is unstable over long period of times. Even when continually powered, the drive will rewrite old data after a while (or it will be integrated in the overall data management that no data will be left alone for too long).
 
Back
Top