Samsung's 850 EVO 4TB is now available

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/samsung-starts-shipping-4tb-model-of-850-evo-ssd.html

...at a price that scares me to think what the PRO version will cost come Fall 2016 when it's supposed to release.

Still, I ain't buying TLC garbage Hope sandisk releases something comparable in MLC flavor.

 

What scares me is not the price... it is the brand (ahhhh!!!).

I predict this will have worse (real world) performance than the 2TB model (because Samsung will try to use a chip that can't handle 4TB of flash properly).

When SanDisk releases anything comparable (even at half the capacity), Samsung's offerings will once again be just a technical choice for anyone that wants the fastest and most consistent storage subsystem 'now'.

 

MLC drives are going the way of SLC it seems...which is unfortunate. Stock up now while they're still available.

 

Hurray! At least it doesn't have JMB563 hidden somewhere... does it? =/ Oh, and the price is ridiculous! =p

 

wow

Sandisk does not sell any products that are mlc.

thier x300 and newer are tlc. 3d nand

i dont know what to say. as far as new products the only known source on planet earth for mlc 3d nand is samsung

this forum has just terrible advice for consumers and people just passing it on. Im not sure i have the time to correct it.


tlc 3d nand ishas a much longer lifespan than the old technology called planar mlc. In the life expectancy and all tests...

Its the top thing available... and essentially the only thing available at sizes like this.

 

Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's better. (Did I just say that? ).

MLC is a known quantity. 3D TLC? Not so much... and it already has issues.


I was asked to setup a system that was bought and put in storage (and forgotten) from early 2014 that had an Intel SSD (180GB).

Two years with no power applied (spec's call for 1 year read 'guarantee').

The system booted up, applied updates, upgraded to Win10x64Pro, upgraded drivers, software, BIOS and installed additional programs and finally the data. Not one hiccup.

Let's see a subpar TLC (yawn, even with 3D nand) that can do that in the middle of 2018 or so.

Then we'll talk about what is the 'top' thing available.

Or, what advice is better or not.

 

@stamar middle and higher grade Sandisk enterprise drives are MLC. TLC drives usually have (small) SLC buffer, and when you run out of it - bye-bye, performance.

 

mlc planar drives will be available as budget drives for a minute.

maybe to a non fab company like mushkin or other weird name ones. and their arent very many of them anyway

like the one i got, mushkin. and they also seem to be selling micron 2 tb planar mlc. but there definitely wont ever be a 4 tb planar mlc drive.

there is really no such thing as something for sale today that is planar tlc. like a camera ssd card.

only for a tablet possibly. but for laptops there really isnt much for sale to even mention.

 

Since when has that been an accomplishment?

 

what do you mean?


No sandisk does not have something for sale called 3d vnand mlc on the market today in any form.

But its likely they will be the next one.

the 3d vnand tlc has a longer warranty and mean time between failure than the mlc. and the nand isnt what ever fails in any tes anyway.

they have something called planar mlc drives but they arent really making that anymore as its obsolete. It could be for sale but actally you will be buying that also from a reseller like mushkin. mushkin seems to be making drives from the obsolete nand from sandisk and micron.


the older technology is obsolete. It actually has absolutely no advantage over any of the newer technology..... as you might expect.

you can look for 3d mlc like is in the 950 pro only to come out soon. from another manufacturer.

but basically you can follow this rule of thumb..... the nand the flash chips of all tested ssds for sale mostly last longer than the controller.
so the difference is entirely in write speed.

the only ssds for sale that could fail in your natural life are the older planar mlc ones, as far as sold as new.

 

The 'accomplishment' was not the fact that the system didn't hiccup once, by itself. It is the fact that an SSD's nand are deemed worthy enough if they can read data back reliably after a year of no power applied. And this system with an Intel SSD did so after 28 or 29 months of being in storage...

The 3D TLC drives haven't even been around that long to have that kind of test of them.

 

the last endurance test i saw the winner was the samsung 850 pro. and second place was the samsung 850 evo for what that matters.

and the failure reason had nothing to do with the nand.

 

@stamar show me any Sandisk Enterprise SSD with TLC NAND except entry-level X300DC.

 

SanDisk x400.
They are all 3d vnand tlc


Actually by the end of this year 100 percent as in every single ssd SanDisk sells as new will be 3d vnand tlc.
There are absolutely no SanDisk planar mlc ssds being introduced from today on.

Some SanDisk planar mlc is being sold to lower level manufactures like mushkin.


There are no known SanDisk mlc ssds in the pipeline.

Although I'm sure they will have something for sale.

 

If and when SanDisk can make 3d vnand mlc drives they will sell those as more expensive models

The mlc will be more expensive and better in some way.

But that doesn't even matter. The 3d tlc drives already out last what they are replacing which is called planar mlc.


The only 3d vnand mlc drives for sale now at from Samsung. There's nothing that shows that the nand lasts longer than tlc version.

It may actually end up being marketing they use by people who are stuck in the difference from several years ago.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=san...ome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#q=sandisk+x400+enterprise

 

There could be ... I can almost say will be
An x500 SanDisk with a higher end controller using SanDisk 3d mlc.

In the future. With some criteria making it better.
Not anytime soon and quite possibly not relevant to most of us.

 

Any SSD shipped today will be able to do this as long as it's not near the end of its wear-life. Near the end of the wear-life, you might have to think about powering it on every 6-8 months or so.

It was an 840 that the last big test was done on. I haven't seen one of this scale for any newer drives. Failure reason was because the NAND was literally worn out.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

Actually, those are all 1z TLC planar, not 3D

 

You must not have seen the price for their 16TB 2.5" enterprise model... just shy of $11k =]

 

This or a used car? Umm... tough decisions.

 

Does anyone know if you can purchase/pre-order the 2016 generation of the 850 series, as besides the article in the OP, there's no info I've been able to find on google (nor does the author provide any way to fact check their info). Logic would follow that if the 4TB drives are shipping, so should the rest of the 2016 generation.

Also, does anyone know if the 2016 generation will include a 2TB mSATA? Granted, the external series 2TB drive is a 2TB mSATA, however the specs compared to the 850 series mSATAs are horrendous.

 

Contact Samsung directly and they'll tell you.

Though you can't use logic when it comes to predicting what will ship first or next.

In any case, if you don't need anything larger than 2TB and you want to buy a Samsung example, the older 2TB 850 EVO or Pro is a better option. Why? Because it is a known quantity at this point.

The 3rd Gen 3D nand from Samsung (or the controller they will release it with) is something of a gamble right now, especially if you don't need the greater than 2TB capacities it is currently aimed at.

 

Samsung Unwraps Massive 4 TB 850 EVO SSD: Speed And Space In One Package

"The 4 TB variant will be available on Amazon beginning July 31.

Unlike other drive warranties that only have the first two to four years covered, the Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB will come with a five-year warranty, making it even sweeter."

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...50-evo-ssd-speed-and-space-in-one-package.htm

 

I need to sell one of my organs to afford two of those

 

Sell your P870DM

 

Then where can I stick the SSDs mate?

 

Dang, yeah, $1500 each. 3k is a bit steep for me for a pair, I will wait until they drop to half that and sell my old, crappy, tiny 2TB ones

Anxious for this because I refuse to keep ripping all my movies until I have more space. I'm tired of so much junk on external only, makes my backups a pain.

 

My thoughts exactly

 

The five year warranty is meaningless (as usual).

See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-850-evo-4tb-ssd-review,4623.html

Having the same '5 year or 300TB written' warranty as their much smaller 1 and 2 TB models makes this product a huge miss for me.

From the same link (above):

96GB spare area is not massive, contrary to popular belief (but, but, it's almost the full size of a 128GB drive... uhm, so?).

See:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10481/the-samsung-850-evo-4tb-ssd-review/2


See the bottom two graphs in the link above. 25% OP'ing (yeah; 1TB) gives this SSD what it needs; consistency over time.

The 48GB built in OP'ing gives us 'okay' consistency for the first few minutes of use (between 5 to 8 minutes?, looking at those graphs). Then, for the next 15 to 20 minutes the consistency varies from HDD to SSD like performance (can everyone say 'laggy' together...). After that we get consistent performance from the SSD (and still slower as time goes on than the two year old SanDisk Extreme 960GB SSD...).

With 25% OP'ing though, we get 4x the steady state performance vs. just the built-in OP'ing.

And yeah, I would still OP this capacity SSD by 33% or more...


So, is this a sweet 4TB SSD? No, not by a long shot (didn't expect anything else from Samsung).

It is a pretty good (3.725GB nominal) 2.495GB (actual, usable, 33% OP'd) SSD.

Still not worth it for $1.5K though.

The 960GB SanDisk Extreme Pro still reigns king today if usable storage subsystem performance (and not just mere capacity) is the goal.

If/when they release an 4TB 850 Pro with MLC nand and an SSD controller to properly power such a beast (the one used in the 4TB EVO is faltering at driving that amount of nand, imo), then we can talk about a new SSD being better, overall and 'sweet'.

Right now? Samsung is in money grabbing mode while giving nothing in return but a few extra nand packages with no performance, reliability or dependability benefits at all (for people that can use this kind of capacity for more than simply storing ripped videos on them).

 

I dunno, for the average user, they are going to fill that drive only 3-4 times in it's lifetime... not a big deal... Not everyone is going to be streaming 100mbit to it for multiple overwrites and filling the warranty in 6 hours...

Some of my higher grade stuff has much higher warranty periods:
fct0 Rated PBW: 17.00 PB, 98.92% remaining
Lifetime data volumes:
Physical bytes written: 183,196,166,693,168
Physical bytes read : 105,270,984,318,240

fct1 Rated PBW: 20.00 PB, 99.92% remaining
Lifetime data volumes:
Physical bytes written: 15,910,289,927,272
Physical bytes read : 20,554,078,961,520

I'll still grab some of the 4TB drives for some testing/usage...

 

The user isn't the only one that 'writes' to the drive.

Between the user, the O/S and the SSD itself, there are many more write demands placed on the nand, including WA, GC and other factors that a user at a high level does not know about.

Anyone that buys a nominal 4TB, $1.5K drive and only writes to it for 16TB max, in it's expected lifetime (I would say at least a decade of use should be 'normal', here) has $$$$ to throw away.

 

On a normal secondary drive, there shouldn't be much of any WA, and standard grooming practices should be ~1 write per day (Based on 840 EVO issues), but that doesn't go into the consumer-facing write counter that would be used for warranty.

True, if you're using it as a single 4TB boot drive, then you may have some other concerns with paging/etc to worry about, but with todays laptops having m.2 for boot and 16GB of DRAM... paging shouldn't be an issue really...

 

Huh? What is a 'normal, secondary drive'? And why is WA not an issue with it? WA isn't an issue when you OP the drive significantly (more than 25%, as Anand used to say). Used without OP'ing, the WA factor depends on not only user workloads, but also the GC routines and TRIM routines too that the firmware specifies for the drive. This can be seen by a 4x increase in the steady state performance of the drive with 25% OP'ing vs. the factory shipped OP level (96GB, with 48GB reserved for pseudo-SLC 'cache').

In any event, this drive would have been most useful in a system where there is only one drive bay available, having this as a secondary drive is beyond extravagant. To put this in a mobile system with it's very poor idle power draw is not progress at all. Hopefully a firmware can fix that aspect soon.

 

Samsung Warranty is as good as nothing (to me at least)

See:
Unable to get warranty on Samsung SSDs in Dubai

 

You aren't going to see 25% OP on consumer level drives like this, esp at this capacity... You have to remember, this is the 850 EVO, not Pro... it's not even designed with steady-state write workloads in mind... This is designed to pack a bunch of low-power, reliable storage into a small form factor. Assume 70-90% read workload.

I understand how GC/OP/TRIM/etc impacts flash, I've worked for Fusion-io selling enterprise flash for the last 6 years. This is just not that big of an issue with desktop/laptop users.

 

to be honest, I only want it for the large storage so I can put all my videos on it. Get two of em and club them into RAID 0 because setting them up as a spanned drive would make them lose TRIM as I read on OC Forums. I don't care for the speeds to be honest as I have an NVMe SSD for the OS.

I wish they would release a 4TB 9.5mm HDD that would fit my laptop so I can get two of em. They only have 12.5mm as of now from Seagate / Samsung

 

We have the same reasons and wants with respect to larger drives. Everyone always says, "just get an external!"

 

when I go out, I only carry my laptop, mouse, and charger. Certainly don't want to add more weight to my heavy Everki Titan Backpack with an external HDD and you know if it's external, it has to be one of those big ones with power since I need 6TB + of space at least. You get the point.

Once you get those 4TB 9.5mm HDDs let me know I'll happily buy them from you and add some beer money as well.

 

External drives are passé.

You need a NAS, a fast ISP, a VPN and unlimited GB's on your mobile plan(s).

 

I still like the old school way, having everything with me locally

 

Me too. That's why my NAS travels with me.

 

Again I am just like Phoenix. I may not even have an internet connection where I am at. Even if I do I sometimes transfer hundreds of GB of data.

I just want to plug in the laptop and be ready to play games, install new games (all my DRM free game installers are on the drives), play movies or music, maybe even all at the same time When the zombie apocalyspse happens I want to have 10,000's of hours of games and movies with me to last me the rest of my life! NAS solution does not suit my needs.

 

Then you'd better start saving...

Even multiple 4TB SSD's won't help you get those thousands of hours of movies and games to last you even to 2017.

Hope that zombie apocalypse won't happen soon.

 

Nah it all fits on my internal drives I'm using It's just I just have about 500 more movies to rip that I can only fit on an external currently. Plus every game I buy is that much more space. Feels like 1999 again with a tiny drive and scrounging for space.

I do have archive backup type stuff on an external already and I am tired of it! I need more space! I even tried drive compression but that didn't help, most large files (movies and game files) are already compressed so it didn't help.

 

I have this now with my 100/100 fios and a few synology NASs... But I also have a 3TB encrypted external WD SFF drive that lives in my backpack for dumping photos while on the road... and I keep a copy of a lot of media from my NAS on that as well.

 

Understood, The Price is way too steep and the technology is primitive , Samsung, Intel,VIA and so forth still wont wake up and introduce Ram-Drives, this would increase the speed immensely , US Census has been using 4 to 6 ft memory boards as drives since the 1950's that take two people to snap into to the huge socket. . SSD's are are a tame watered down version of drive- memory sticks. This enables them to incrementally increase speeds and size call it a brand new much much better product in some cases for huge price tags on technology that will be obsolete in a few years-the way they do things.

 

There's just a tiny, miniscule snag with a RAM drive... power, as in loss of.

Taking a ludicrous stance such as "...This enables them to incrementally increase speeds and size call it a brand new much much better product in some cases for huge price tags...", is... well... ludicrous, demonstrating a level of ignorance regarding the subject matter.

• Have you ever been involved in microchip design and fabrication?
• Perhaps you're an electrical engineer, with an emphasis on transistor and/or semiconductor engineering?
• Perhaps you have experience with R&D at a semiconductor manufacturing facility?

When was the last time you made something that contained anything with a dimension of 20nm [0.00002mm]? Have you ever designed something with a dimension of 20nm?

Prior to making ludicrous & ridiculous claims, it would behoove us all to fact check our own perspectives prior to publicizing them. If one has an opinion about something, research it... none of us can ever have enough fact-based knowledge.

Attached is an electron microscope cross layer image of 48 layer 3D V-NAND

 

In addition to jmonroe's excellent points, there is another reason NAND manufacturers and semiconductor fabrication factory owners follow this pattern: fabs are hugely expensive, and cost-effective only when they operate at close to full capacity. If these companies focused all their resources on generational technology leaps (say MRAM or PRAM) instead of using some of their resources to focus on those and others to focus on incremental gains in current technology (NAND), then they would quickly start hemmoraging money. Focusing solely on future tech would mean present tech stayed stagnant and would become eclipsed by the incremental increases of others. That would conversely slow down sales, which would slow down production on the fabs to the point that they would lose enormous sums of money. So even if they ended up being the first to come up with really revolutionary tech, they wouldn't have the cashflow to ramp production of them back up to match demand.

In short, incremental gains are a business necessity.

 

that was back in 2014,

Things have changed a bit. I found this information for my friend in Canada last week, but was told that it is the same for all international customers:

1. After speaking with US support, found out that Samsung Canada doesn't support SSDs because they are a US product that retailers in Canada import from the US and sell. Like how if you buy a cell phone or laptop in the US, and move to Canada, you still have to contact US support for Warranty assistance. (this is prob why Samsung in Dubai didn't warranty or know what the drive is, as units sold in your area are probably imported from Europe or US.)

2. There are several different ways to contact Samsung's US SSD support. Number for Canadian's (I think this will work for anyone outside the US) to call: 1-888-480-5655, I think the prompts are 1, 7, 1.

Email: either [email protected] or [email protected]. Or, now they have live chat also. Got this from a hyperlink in SSD support's email: Live Chat

3. Outside the US, they only cover shipping to send the repaired or replaced unit back to you.