120GB Samsung 840 Series 2.5" SATA III Internal Solid State Drive SSD (MZ-7TD120KW) $79.99 + Free Shipping

Lifespan of SSD:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/foru...nm-Vs-34nm

Price for SSD seems to be going down across the board. I'll wait for this to hit $0.5/Gb as well. Good deal for those who really want it now though.

Quote from exhurt : I highly doubt they'll be able to tell the difference between the regular and the pro version unless his job requires him to use a really fast hard drive.

I think this is the truth!.. It is also SATA2 so reliability is the only thing I am concerned about.

Quote from pengar : This is very tempting, I was looking at getting a 64 gb for this price. How does this drive match up to other modern drives? Is this old technology?

Would this be backward compatible with SATA I II?

raid 0 YOLO

I have 3 of the drives mentioned in some of Tom's reviews.

Intel 330 180gb, Intel 330 240gb, Samsung 830 128gb

All 3 are fast and am happy and not worth the effort in switching drives to see which might boot up 4 seconds faster than the other in an identical computer.

Guessing which will die first is probably like guessing which person will die first of "natural" causes. It's probably more of a function of 1. how they lived their life - drive usage duration under what stress situations for how long etc. and 2.pure luck of the draw - then anything else and thus impossible to predict with accuracy with a small sampling.

Most reviews are predicting longer life with the Samsung 840 pro vs. Samsung 840 on the average (may take you a few hundred drives to attempt to verify this and a lot of time (probably years).

Just read the above....http://www.xtremesystems.org/foru...nm-Vs-34nm
after posting.
Interesting end of forum post from one of the contributors,":I don't understand the argument either. For any normal consumer workload, the 840's durability is more than sufficient. By my calculations, it would take me close to 200 years to wear out the 250GB 840 I own, and I don't intend to keep the drive for that long."

Just bought 2... thanks to the OP!

Quote from konradsa : Got the Intel 330 180GB for $90 AR from tigerdirect, that was a great deal.

Dang, when was this. That's a pretty good deal.

I recently bought the Samsung 840 250gb version and couldn't be happier. The kit with this is a good deal because it comes with the USB SATA connector in case you want to clone the drive from a laptop. I didn't use it for that upgrade, but used it for another I did later on. Most of the SSD drives don't come with that. Nice to have.

Now, do I buy the 120gb to upgrade my old SATA II laptop? Must resist temptation

This is my first time buying a SSD and I'm very interested in purchasing 120+ GB one

Can someone tell me which is better? This SSD is going into my desktop.


My 2 choices are between the one in this thread (samsung 840) vs. the one in the link below. I don't mind doing MIR. Both are $80. HELP WILL BE APPRECIATED AND +REP

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applic...LNTBhFdxNw

Dang. I just bought the 64GB Samsung 830 for $40 @micro center a few days ago. Wish I woulda waited for this.

Quote from tarheel1 : Would this be backward compatible with SATA I II?

yes it would, you would just be capped at SATA2 speeds.

Quote from Tweak155 : My dad gets by on 80gb on his desktop. So he went "over the top" for his laptop at 120gb. I mean that is literally 50% more storage, huge step up!

If you're going from a HDD to a SSD, bear in mind that you want to keep about 20%-30% of the SSD empty. The drive needs free space for its wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms to work. If you don't have much free space, the write speeds will quickly fall down to HDD levels.

SSDs are not like HDDs where you can overwrite a 1 with a 0, or a 0 with a 1. You have to first erase the memory cell before you can change its value (it's like an EEPROM for you old electronics guys). The garbage collection algorithm does these erases while the drive is not busy so the free space is ready to write to at a moment's notice. But if you have a full drive and erase stuff to make room for new stuff, it's not going to have enough time to run garbage collection and writing will now be an erase/write instead of just a write. Your write speeds will drastically slow down as a result.

Wear leveling is where the drive moves data around to try to make sure all memory cells are equally used. If the drive is near full, it has a harder time doing this effectively, and will also slow down writes (since it has to do the erase/write cycle to move stuff).

So for a 120 GB drive, you probably want to keep 20-30 GB free. Meaning it's more like a 90-100 GB drive.

Quote from trnddwn33 : For a 3 year old desktop you will likely not be able to tell the difference. Save the 40 bucks.

trnddwn33 didn't explain why. SATA 3 didn't really start showing up in motherboards until 2009, and even then it was mostly high-end motherboards until 2010/2011. So anything 3 years old probably only has SATA 2 ports. SATA 2 is limited to 300 MB/s, well below the speeds the top tier SSDs like the 840 Pro are capable of. They need SATA 3 (600 MB/s) to really shine.

So unless you're planning to upgrade the computer soon and move the SSD to the new computer, the extra $40 for the 840 Pro is a waste.

Quote from exhurt : Dang, when was this. That's a pretty good deal.

There was a glut in the NAND market around summer of 2012, with prices falling below manufacturing costs. That's when the best SSD deals were - around $0.50/GB in the summer and early fall of 2012. Manufacturers reduced production in response, and prices have normalized meaning the best deals now are around $0.67/GB.

So unless a similar NAND glut develops this year, it's pointless comparing to SSD prices from back then. Anyone citing those 2012 prices as examples of a good deal also needs to factor in the cost of a time machine to travel back to 2012.

in for 1 for my thinkpad t60... this will be my last update for my 6 years old lappy...

Quote from Solandri : If you're going from a HDD to a SSD, bear in mind that you want to keep about 20%-30% of the SSD empty. The drive needs free space for its wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms to work. If you don't have much free space, the write speeds will quickly fall down to HDD levels. SSDs are not like HDDs where you can overwrite a 1 with a 0, or a 0 with a 1. You have to first erase the memory cell before you can change its value (it's like an EEPROM for you old electronics guys). The garbage collection algorithm does these erases while the drive is not busy so the free space is ready to write to at a moment's notice. But if you have a full drive and erase stuff to make room for new stuff, it's not going to have enough time to run garbage collection and writing will now be an erase/write instead of just a write. Your write speeds will drastically slow down as a result. Wear leveling is where the drive moves data around to try to make sure all memory cells are equally used. If the drive is near full, it has a harder time doing this effectively, and will also slow down writes (since it has to do the erase/write cycle to move stuff). So for a 120 GB drive, you probably want to keep 20-30 GB free. Meaning it's more like a 90-100 GB drive.

Depends on your uses. You can use your drive how you want, but doesn't mean your rules need to apply to everyone.

EDIT:

Also his 80gb is already an SSD.