250GB Samsung 840 Series 2.5" SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive SSD (MZ-7TD250BW) + Assassin's Creed 3 PC Game Coupon $150 + Free Shipping (expired)

Quote from lordshin : I don't think he's bashing Samsung specifically, but informing us on the inferior technology. I'm new to SSD so I appreciate the info.

He's filling your mind with bad info.

Quote from robvas : He's filling your mind with bad info.

Agreed. Yes, TLC NAND offers fewer P/E cycles than 2x-nm class MLC, but unless you're doing something unusual or are wanting the drive to last 15 years, it's a perfectly acceptable drive. You know if you fall into that category. TLC NAND will eventually allow this drive to hit price/capacity points that MLC simply cannot, extending the reach of this truly game-changing technology (SSDs in general).

While it would be nice if Samsung made a more clear distinction between the technology underlying the 840 and 840 Pro, most of the negativity on the TLC NAND the non-pro variant uses is hyperbole.

Disclaimer: Owner of 1x 840, 2x 840 Pro, 4x 830, and 5x Intel G2/G3 SSDs.

You guys saying that TLC is good enough may be right for yourself. But I wager I do not use my drives the same as you do. I have written 4 Tebibytes of data to a single 80 Gigabyte Intel X-25M SSD over a few years. And the drive averaged three quarters full while I did all that. So that leaves 20 Gigabytes of actual space heavily written to for all that.

4,194,304 MB / 20,480 Mb = 204.8 writes average per cluster/sector.

I really doubt the TLC drives *ALWAYS* exceed the claimed 750 writes they are supposed to be good for. And one single failure means a hard crash and lost data, or at best a bad cluster and file system repair work along with a S.M.A.R.T flag on the drive for the failure.

Let us think of this another way. There are 750 sandwiches in front of you. One of them has hydrogen cyanide mixed in. But they are really cheap. You never know if the next bite will be excruciatingly painful and lethal, or just a good sandwich. Would you bother or would you pay a reasonable price that is just a tiny bit more to be certain it will be a good sandwich?

Honestly there are many factors to consider on this thing. Far more than my simplified example touches upon. But this deal is awful. If you like it, good for you and I hope it works so well that I sound like a paranoid fool. Be well everyone.

Anand didn't run the drive until it was dead. When you do that you get 443 terabytes [xtremesystems.org], if you're writing 20GB/day that will last you 61 years. If your plans are to be using this drive in 2074, more power to you.

Note that was a 120gig, a 256 should last significantly longer.

even though I am tired of seeing this drive on FP every ****ing day, I think this deal deserves it IF you want assassin's creed 3. If I was a fan, I would buy it in a heartbeat considering the game alone retails for 50 bucks. that makes this SSD 100.00 which is awesome.

Fortunately for me, I dont buy games until steam has them on sale for 5 bucks (lol), so this is still not an FP worthy deal (for me).

On a side note, I've been using the OCZ vertex 2 64gb on my macbook 2006 since it was released (I paid 150 for it, OUCH!)... its given my laptop new life, and zero problems since I've had it.

Bottom line, for the budget conscious person that needs an SSD to give new life to an aging computer, or only uses their pc for word processing/web browsing... buy the cheapest SSD you can, regardless of brand, as long as there arent too many negative reviews about reliability/firmware issues, and you won't regret it.

Where does it say that it comes with AC3? I cannot find it anywhere on the product page.

Quote from grindswiss : Where does it say that it comes with AC3? I cannot find it anywhere on the product page.

They took the game back off so now the deal is for the drive only again.

Quote from calistyle : They took the game back off so now the deal is for the drive only again.

Ahh dang, definitely not FP material anymore.

Seems like there's a slickdeal on a Samsung SSD every week. This isn't even newsworthy anymore cause there will be another deal along in a week or 2.

Quote from RedZoneOS : Bottom line, for the budget conscious person that needs an SSD to give new life to an aging computer, or only uses their pc for word processing/web browsing... buy the cheapest SSD you can, regardless of brand, as long as there arent too many negative reviews about reliability/firmware issues, and you won't regret it.

I bought 256GB Sandisk SSD for $140. It has very slow IOPS (whatever that is) but I still got Windows Experience score of 7.3! I'm very happy with the drive. It's not has fast as these Sammy's but I don't care. I don't need the fastest out there, just fast.

Quote from aznalan15 : I "recycle" my HDs through computers so I use them for ~7-10 years, would this SSD last that long?

Quote from vairox : Good question, I still have two 250gb WD IDE drives in my i5-3570k system that I've used for about ten years, never a problem... current drives just don't really seem all that reliable regardless of technology.

I read an article about this recently, my concern as well. Toms Hardware has a bit here that calculates what amounts to 5 years of life with 7gig per day written:

http://www.tomshardware.com/revie...24-11.html

The other article i read said roughly 8 years MTBF in average home use:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/573...ssd-review

I did some reading a few months back after the Kingston HypberX 3k model meaning raised my hackles. Those 2 articles put me at some ease. Plus i've had a laptop with an Intel X25 80g in it for just over 2 years. Running the Intel tool shows 100% health yet, and I use it daily, games, surfing, light business use, etc. We'll see in a few years i guess, Since 4 PC's and a laptop in our household are now booting off Intel X25 or 320's and Samsung 830s and my gaming rig has the HyperX 3k for Steam games.

I dunno about getting 7-10 years out of it, but i'd be lucky to do that with platters. I'm probably approaching 6 years with some Samsung 80g satas in daily use at home, but most have been taken out of service in favor of SSD's. And I do have two 20gig IDE WD's in an old dual 733MHz server from back in the day, probably over 10yrs each. But, they are only powered up a few times a year to archive some stuff, identical on each, and then shut down.

[QUOTE=howiez;57861046 And I do have two 20gig IDE WD's in an old dual 733MHz server from back in the day, probably over 10yrs each. But, they are only powered up a few times a year to archive some stuff, identical on each, and then shut down.[/QUOTE]


I've used mine in a virtual 24/7 power on system for about ten years, granted it's probably 95% idle time but I still think that's pretty phenomenal for hard drives...

Quote from sleeprae : TLC NAND offers fewer P/E cycles than 2x-nm class MLC, but unless you're doing something unusual or are wanting the drive to last 15 years.

Quote from HardOCP : The results of our latency testing initially raised the red flag. We knew that we were going to encounter slow write speeds with this SSD, but what we did not expect was to receive abysmal maximum read and write latency. Latency spikes of this nature are undoubtedly going to lead to interruptions in the flow of computing for users. SSDs with appreciably lower maximum latency can still experience the occasional hiccup, but with ranges of up to 67ms (three times higher than the nearest competing SSD) there is guaranteed to be laggy performance in many scenarios. Users will become accustomed to staring at the little blue spinning circle with this SSD in their system. The slow sequential speed of the SSD will make simple procedures, such as copying pictures and videos, long drawn out affairs. Bear in mind that some 5400rpm HDDs can write at initial speeds of 140MB/s, and sustain a speed of 80-90MB/s. The fact that the 130MB/s that this SSD provides is even in the range of a 5400rpm HDD speaks volumes. Endurance does become a concern with this capacity point, falling in at 3.5-4 years of light usage. The worst aspect is the extreme amount of read degradation that this SSD suffers once it reaches steady state. The read speed of the 120GB 840 is supposed to be its most redeeming quality, but once in steady state it dropped to the bottom of our charts. Taking away the one advantage of this drive leaves us with nothing more to say.

Quote from HardOCP on the 256 drive : Samsung claims that the Samsung 840 Series SSD performs with just as low of a power threshold as the Samsung 840 Pro. Reason dictates that this is not possible due to the fact that TLC will have a higher P/E voltage requirement. The voltages we recorded with the Samsung 840 are higher than the Samsung 840 Pro across the board, and also exhibit one of the highest idle voltages that we have witnessed. This is probably due to some hefty background processes to handle the TLC NAND. The random write voltage was unsurprisingly very high, and the sequential write voltage requirement is also on the high end. With this being a relatively new SSD, with its TLC destined to begin producing more errors over the life of the drive, we would expect these power consumption figures to grow over the life of the SSD. Even with these relatively 'fresh' readings we feel that this would not be the best SSD for mobile applications.

Quote from HardOCP on the 500 GB drive : Samsung claims that the TLC 840 Series SSDs perform with just as low of a power threshold as the 840 Pro. Reason dictates that this is not possible due to the fact that TLC will have a higher P/E voltage requirement. The voltages we recorded with the 500GB TLC 840 are higher than the 840 Pro across the board, though its idle voltage is much lower than the 250GB version. The random write voltage was unsurprisingly very high, and the sequential write voltage requirement is also on the high end. Even with these relatively 'fresh' readings we feel that this would not be the best SSD for mobile applications.

No reason to choose TLC over MLC.

Quote from superstition, quoted from HardOCP : Endurance does become a concern with this capacity point, falling in at 3.5-4 years of light usage.

They were commenting specifically about the 120GB drive; this is a thread about the 250. At any defined GB/day write specification, the capacity of the drive (and write amplification factor) is critical to determining its durability. HardOCP seems to be assuming a near worst-case (and unrealistic) write amplification of 10 to get those figures on a 120GB drive. Anandtech's review and special statement on TLC endurance is probably more realistic, estimating just under 12 years of life for typical usage on the 120GB version (over 23 years on the 250GB) until the wearout indicator hits 0--which doesn't mean the drive is dead. Most drives far outlast the 0-life-remaining indication. Again, that's the 120GB version, but even HardOCP's review has the following sentence in the paragraph just after the one you quoted (emphasis mine):

Quote from HardOCP : We do continue to highly recommend the 250GB and 500GB TLC Samsung 841[sic] SSDs for typical consumer workloads.

With regard to power consumption for mobile applications, I wish HOCP had compared to mechanical drives--this thing would likely win by a landslide, while performing several orders of magnitude better as well. It's also worth pointing out that Anandtech's review of the 250GB version had it consuming less power at idle, sequential write, and sequential read than its 256GB 830 predecessor.

Nobody is suggesting that this is the best SSD on the market or that it is even in the upper tier. However, this drive will perform better in real-world usage than any mechanical and it only falters when compared to the latest generations of top tier SSDs. I'm not sure that you fully appreciate the point of this drive. What this SSD will do, eventually, is bring prices at its capacity points to levels unattainable by MLC. I believe that this drive represents the next phase in the push to finally bring solid state technology to the masses. It's still fairly new, and is already hitting price points as low or lower than even late runs of the last generation of drives. That is a very good sign.

You don't like this drive and that's entirely your right. Nobody is forcing you, or even asking you, to buy one. I simply ask that you stop making this drive out to be the boogieman for those looking to SSDs for the first time.

So,

Quote from superstition : No reason to choose TLC over MLC.

If you can get the 840 and the 840 Pro for the same price, then I certainly agree--the MLC 840 Pro is the better choice. I've purchased multiples myself. But if one is looking to stay under a budget or just wants a good price on a very decent SSD, there is no reason to categorically eliminate the 840 from consideration just because of its NAND heritage.