Doesn't really mater if the price goes down, its still a niche product. The EVO's are great general purpose desktop drives. But the people who need a general purpose desktop drive, mostly don't need 4TB and would not buy one at $500 let alone at $1500. In my case, I've got a 250GB Evo and a 1 TB spinning disk for storage of music, pictures, video etc. So I guess a cheap enough 2 TB SSD could work for me just because it would be marginally easier to not have two separate chunks of storage to deal with...but thats just a marginal increase in convienience. The stuff I have on a spinning disk doesn't really need the performance of an SSD anyway.
I know, now someone will jump in with "well I sure need that 4 TB" but I still say that isn't the norm. I really don't believe they will sell very many of these compared to the 1 TB and below even if the price comes down.
OTOH lack of competition will probably counter that to an extent... But I'm glad it exists too, if nothing else it might mean more sales on the 2TB. :p
was so funny when i clicked on 25% OP, but really the extra OP is really only needed for places where your writing constantly as normally the drive is Trimmed (most SSD/HDDs life is read then write, unless in a server setup that does lots of writes) the drives normal hidden OP is what 400-500MB ?
Agree. This shows that HDDs are here to stay for another decade. The same for 4 TB in form of a HDD can be had for about $130. So that 1/10th of the SSD price and as you said for media files, you don't need an SSD at all.
If you have 4TB of stuff to store and it's mostly media that is accessed infrequently, it would only make sense to buy a 4TB SSD over a 4TB HDD if the prices are comparable. We've technically had SSDs for decades, it's just that they used to be in the millions of dollars per drive rather than $100 or so. Exactly how production will change to make 4TB drives cheaper isn't clear. It could be that we've already reached the lowest price per GB and all that remains is to have that scale linearly. This would mean that if 250GB drives cost $60, then a 4TB drive should cost 16 times that, or $960. Maybe some kind of discount could bring it into the $750 range, but in order to get down to $130 we need significant changes. That would put a 250GB drive on the order of $25.
Of course it's not "needed" right now, but it's nice to see progress. The 6 GB HDD I used in my Pentium system was plenty at the time - I didn't "need" those fancy new 20 GB drives...
But then again why would you? Unless you are starving, and if you are, then you wouldn't be buying SSDs...
I can't honestly think of any good reason to buy something other than samsung SSD - they have the most warranty and performance is top notch too, reliability seems to be better too.
Support and spec compliance. Samsung *still* ship firmware that claims support for queued TRIM ATA commands, but erases data if they're actually used. The consistent response is "Windows doesn't use these commands, we don't support other OS's", never mind that it's part of the SATA spec.
(no, the kernel bug they fixed is completely unrelated)
I *hate* manufacturers treating "works in current Windows" as an acceptable spec - it's guaranteed to shoot you in the foot down the line, as everyone saw with Vista. So I bought a SanDisk instead.
Acutally, I hate to back up Microsoft, but they DID say it was a complete re-write of Windows, and that it would not be the same OS at all.
It performed horribly with low amounts of RAM, and at the time, the big RAM makers were in collusion over RAM price fixing (look it up), so that is why we saw laptops, with Vista being shipped with 256MB of RAM, which was a mess, I agree.
But someone like myself, who had way more RAM than that, found it to be just fine. And it was way less infected than XP too.
I guess your printer never received a Vista driver then? Too bad.
But for me, and other client workstations with reasonable amounts of installed RAM I oversaw, it worked just fine, from the first day I used it.
Except they lied. Go onto your desktop and try to make a folder called "con". You can't, even on Windows 10, because they are still using code from Windows for Workgroups.
There are a few others that (PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1...), which are all legacy Windows device names. They never '"rewrote" anything from the ground up.
That's a valid point, and even though majority of the people who buy consumer stuff are gonna use it on windows, it is still no excuse, it is not like samsung doesn't have the resources to dedicate to proper support.
Yeah. I had two really sour back to back experiences with Samsung Storage support, one regarding the 840 EVO. After a month of back and fourth communication attempting different firmware updates as support requested, secure erase and reimage, and even trying the drive in another PC as support asked, it was obvious they were in denial of the well documented read performance problem. After RMA they shipped me back another 840 EVO that eventually (after a year) developed the same problems even with the latest firmware update. The problems always come up after a lot of writes like a game install. It wasn't worth the trouble. I would have been happy if they simply replaced the drive with an 850 EVO.
The FW update that came out in April completely fixed the issue. I posted several updates on a 840 EVO and an 840 EVO m-sata on Overclock that are fine well over a year since the fix.
Huh, go figure, they DID issue an 840 update towards the end of June (2016)... What the heck took so long? I think most people had rightfully assumed the 840 (non EVO) was abandoned, the EVO did come out like 6 months after it.
Apparently the issue was also never quite as severe on the 840 non EVO? Did they ever commit to a fix and it got drowned out over time or did that update happen out of the blue? No AT Pipeline post about it either...
Why wouldn't you? When you're talking TBs, that difference translates in HUNDREDS of dollars that I have better use for when Sandisk's performance is already good enough.
This drive only really makes sense in oddly demanding small laptops.
I mean I understand and agree that Samsungs are the better drives to buy at lower capacities right now, but if you needed 4TB or more you just have to be silly to spend $700 more.
"I can't honestly think of any good reason to buy something other than samsung SSD"
1) People who were burned by the very poor steady state performance (according to one professional review site) of the original 840 120 GB.
2) People who were burned by the problems with the 840 EVO and who aren't impressed by the kludgy work-around of re-writing data again and again.
3) People who haven't been impressed with generations of BS power consumption specs. It's only recently that we're now seeing ratings for read/write power consumption. Prior to that, though, there generations/years of Samsung SSDs with ".17 watt" power consumption nonsense. This was not only the only thing on their site for SSDs that used plenty of watts when working (like the 830 and 840) — consumers even advised each other in the comments in places like this to choose Samsung because of the very low power consumption (even though the 840 topped the chart here, as I recall, for consuming the most watts when writing).
But, that said, the 850 seems to be the first decent TLC SSD so I'm glad the company has made significant improvement.
I guess I got lucky, went straight from 830s to 850 EVOs & SM951, have yet to get burnt. Though to be honest, every other SSD OEM out there (including Intel) had at least one catastrophic scenario like the 840's (often worse, resulting in data loss), if not several such scenarios.
I'm not completely excusing Samsung, because their handling of the situation wasn't optimal (went from trying to brush it under that rug to a kludgy fix that didn't even cover the non EVO)... But I'm also not holding it against them.
2. completely fixed in April of 2015. Doesn't constantly rewrite data, the new algorithm itself fixes the read speeds and the idle write thing they have is a just in case the algorithm can't fix it.
3. Use desktops, so can't say anything about power consumption.
That is only a viable option if you have a desktop computer or a Thunderbolt external drive enclosure. An initial price of $1499 is a lot but 4TB is ridiculous. And if that price drops to $999, that would be even more bonkers. I remember the days when having just 1TB was that price. The fact that we are at 4 times the capacity for the same price and WAY better performance is nuts.
And the reliability issue of one device failure trashing all the data, though one could get round this by using four 2TB in RAID10 which wouldn't be so bad, but still a lot of ports, etc.
But you could buy 8TB of MLC-based Mushkin Reactor for the price of 4TB of 850 EVO. Then you consider a RAID of Reactors will be 4x the sequential performance of a 850 EVO.
And let's face it, with a storage drive like a 4TB SSD, sequential performance is all that really matters unless you actually plan to use it as a boot/system drive.
We got clarification from Mushkin at the time when we posted similar: the $500 price point was actually a mischaracterization. The initial price would be much closer to $1000, with $500 being a goal nearer EOL.
TRIM has been working on RAID for a while, years actually, at least on Intel's newer chipsets... They kept it from older chipsets (like my old rig's P67) but enterprising users back ported it thru BIOS edits/hacks.
I strongly suspect that Intel is going to be price competitive in the NVMe space so that's realistic but I'd expect a massive premium for Xpoint in DIMM format when Skylake-E comes around.
There's a lot of pie in the sky dreaming about Xpoint IMO... Why would it be priced at a premium? Same reason M.2 NVMe & PCI-E drives are, it's what the market will bear that counts. If it's any faster it'll be more expensive, simple really.
Don't hold your breath. They made claims of "ram" speed, but demoed 2 GB/s hardware, which is not much faster than nvme SSDs. Ram is 20-30 GB/s...
SSDs can still go a long way in terms of bandwidth - just snap more chips on more channels, given an available interface to hook it to, it would be too much trouble for the industry to create something like 8 GB/s SSD. And it only requires a better controller chip, can work with the same old flash memory chips. Currently, M2 can only provide theoretical 4 GB/s bandwidth, running at 32 gbit.
Not at all. There're many scenarios where one would chose a larger drive without immediate need. In fact I'd never take a drive I can immediately fill up a 100%, what'd be the point in that? Also this is a consumer drive and how many customers do you know *writing* away TB after TB, many kinds of data are actually write-once-read-often...
My laptop SSD has been powered on for pretty much exactly two years now and seen 10TB writes per year. My home VM server sees 9.2 TB writes per year. So pretty much harmless and those two cases are already very much non-consumer scenarios...
If you really do a lot of writing, say you work with RAW 4k video, then you really don't care that much about latency, all you care about is bandwidth and capacity. In this case, what you really need is a good RAID controller and a dozen of good old HDDs.
This drive is not suited for 4K video work, everyone knows that. Using an EVO for that kind of work iwould be very irresponsible and failure is 100% in the hands of the user .
Indeed and at this point you'd want a fast NVMe drive for high quality 4k captures.
A 4 TB SATA SSD does have utility as a means to provide storage for an assort of cameras and equipment build around SATA drives. There are a lot of those out there mainly because U.2 hasn't taken hold (yet?).
Exactly. I know someone who's been testing 8K editing at a movie company, he was able to get over 8GB/sec from a good Enterprise PCIe device, with consistent performance being absolutely critical. He did try RAIDs of 850 Pros but they just couldn't handle it.
Well, that's the 840 pro - old stuff... Also, it is possible that samsung have more strict criteria of when a sector becomes unreliable and requires reallocation.
What is the use case for this drive? $1500 for mass storage? Price per GB may be comparable to smaller drives, but that is still a huge chunk of change to get, what?
It's a consumer drive, not an Enterprise drive. Video and Photo editors are going to hit it hard, so the lower endurance rating is going to hurt it for use in those applications. All I can see is that it is a halo product to push the industry forward, purchased only by those who have lots of spare cash to spend. Am I missing something?
RAW photos, audio, video, basically any kind of data acquisition - those eat a lot of capacity. At 1500$ I'd argue this is not a consumer but a prosumer product.
I'd say video editing. It's not uncommon to come home with a terabyte of footage from multiple 4K cameras over multiple days of shooting. And you may be editing multiple projects at a time.
This would make a hell of a media drive... fast and local.
And when you're done with the projects... you move them to slower mass storage for safekeeping.
My point being, if you are a hobbyist, $1500 is a huge entry point, especially when the, albeit slow, hard drives come in a just a couple hundred dollars.
If you are a professional, you are going to want Enterprise level drives with the endurance and warranty support. But if you are using multiple cameras shooting 4K footage, you probably have so much invested there, that $1500 for a storage drive isn't a huge percentage of the overall equipment budget. For me, I'm just using a 1080p camcorder for now, so my budget is way lower!
I'm mostly 1080p... with occasional 4K. I don't need this 4TB drive... but I've got my eye on the 1TB version. Right now I'm editing on a 1TB WD Black... and its slowness shows!
Is $1500 expensive? It depends. It's just a bigger version of the 2TB model... which is a bigger version of the 1TB model... etc.
Drives in higher capacities always cost more money... especially the first of its kind (4TB in a single SSD)
Asking "who is this for?" is usually a difficult question. My best guess... I'd say it's for someone who wants a single SSD... but needs to hold more than 2TB. :)
Moved to 2x 1TB 850 EVOs myself a while back (with an SM951 256GB for OS/apps), can't wait until the higher capacities come down in price... Depending on how much of a premium the 4TB sustains over time I could see myself adding one (or two) 2TB or just going straight to 4TB.
Mostly working with 1080p and relatively small 16MP RAWs... Bought the 1TB before the 2TB was readily available but I don't really regret that bit, higher seqs when going to the SM951 and easier to repurpose them later on.
One use case, which is admittedly niche: musicians using virtual instruments.
Instrument sample libraries can run into the multi-gigabyte range (have ~2gb in total myself, and I'm only a hobbyist), and are built up of recordings of instruments playing single notes in various volumes, styles, etc., depending on the library's level of detail sometimes recordings of the transitions between notes.
Less detailed virtual instruments may only eat up a few hundred MB in samples; it's not a huge deal to load the entire thing into memory for those. However, more detailed ones can run in the tens of GB's per instrument for all the different layers, and once you start building up an entire virtual orchestra, you will have to resort to loading them from the disk during playback, and for that you require something with low latency and high throughput... hence the use of SSD's. Don't even need the write endurance in a case like this, even.
Nah, you really want samples loaded in RAM. RAM is cheap, even a modest DAW system will have at least 16 gigs of ram. Latency really matters here, and RAM latency is much, much lower than SSD, and sample libraries aren't that big. Sure, there are a few libraries in excess of 30 GB, but you really use a much smaller subset of the whole thing at a time.
It really depends on which sample libraries you're using, and some of the big ones get quite huge. The (perhaps now mere) 32gb RAM on my system only can hold so much, especially with some of the big EastWest libraries.
The other advantage of course, is that I can load my entire template in a matter of a couple of minutes instead of waiting 15 minutes for it to load off a regular HDD.
Silh is right. My DAW system has 64GB of RAM and all of my samples are stored on a 400GB Intel PCIe NVME drive. I'm only a hobbyist but my set of samples is well into the 200GB range. Pros with all of the gear can easily break 1+ TB
Pros are actually invested in making music than obsessing with sample hoarding ;)
NI KOMPLETE is 100 GB and it has pretty much everything you are ever going to need. Naturally, that means actual analog instruments. A lot of mediocre pseudo musicians obsess on hoarding what is not instrument samples but ready to use loops they can play and imagine they are doing music. The format of distribution of that stuff is as stupid as it is itself - since it is not really live performance and usually synthesized sound, it could just as well be distributed as midi + synthesizer presets, and take kilobytes rather than gigabytes - a million times less space...
Smilingcrow is right on point here. While ddriver's words may accurately convey the mindset of a certain subset of "musicians" using computers, VI orchestrators and pro producers in many genres are not just using loops; describing these writers, arrangers, performers and engineers as "pseudo musicians" indicates a complete lack comprehension as to how these extremely talented folks work.
And while is NI Komplete is wonderful, it is not (yet, if ever) the be all and end all. Incredible VIs are being developed every day by other developers, bringing new levels of fidelity and expression, making greater demands on system real-time performance and soaking up ever-increasing swaths of storage space.
Have a look at some of the professional orchestral libraries. These are not loops, or instrument runs, but individual note samples, recorded with multiple articulations, velocity layers, different mic positions, etc. You're looking at at 300GB+ for, say, just the strings. VSL's full orchestra comes in about 1TB if you put everything together (and priced waaaaaaaay out of what I can afford).
RAW Photo editing is harmless: you import all data once and from then on it's mostly reading data. Even if you're a pro you'll have a hard time filling 4x64GB cards a day and you certainly won't sustain that throughout a year. So even if you believed in that segment-my-ass 300TB endurance figure you'll be using it for 3 or 4 years...
Sure, editing involves mostly reading, you edit the photos then throw away the changes. But even then, photoshop will generate tens of gigabytes of temporary scratch files ;)
Of course that's the reason. We all know a PCI-e/M.2 SSD (whether it uses NVMe or not) will blow the pants off any SATA SSD when it comes to performance numbers.
I would hope that when a manufacturer moves to a new process there would be a corresponding drop in $/GB. To be moving to 48layer and still charging ~30c is worrying. Needs to be a third of that to be anything other than a wet dream for consumer.
The theorised ssd takeover of HDDs doesnt seem to be materialising yet.
A new process doesn't mean immediate cost savings. It takes time for yields to mature and even then 48L has more process steps than 32L. Ultimately it's a game of economics. Why would you sell something for 10c when the competition is charging 30c? For companies it's always all about the profit.
At CES Mushkin said they were planning on releasing a 4TB SSD by the end of the year. They are targeting a $500 price point. Unless they scrapped it, this could be a cheaper option before the end of the year.
I should of figured it was to good to be true. Still a competing $1000 drive could convince Samsung to lower their price. Assuming the speed is comparable between the two.
Way WAY WAAAAYYY too expensive. For this price you could get piece together a RAID configuration out of regular HDD and get a decent amount of the same performance AND the added bonus of having redundancy in the case of a drive failure. Can't see who purchases this.
Isn't the 25% over-provisioning getting a bit much for these larger SSDs? Does a 4TB SSD really need 1TB over-provisioning to max-out relative performance? Would 10% be enough for these large drives?
That is something I've wondered about and will probably look in to eventually, but it would be pretty time consuming to test and isn't something I can see adding to the routine suite of benchmarks.
Thanks for your reply. I believe that you should just test this 4TB SSD for now to see the impact and another couple of different ~4TB SSDs when available to compare with these results. Forget about the lesser drives, too many and too late.
hopefully we see more manufacturers release 4tb and greater SSDs...these drives will end the need for platter based hard drives for good...price is too high right now but it should come down over the next 6 months to a year.
I think it might take longer than that, the 1TB model hasn't budged much in the year since I bought 2, and neither has the 2TB after it's release... A 4TB faces even less direct competition than those do. I guess 3D NAND from others will eventually start to challenge Samsung tho, but it sure has taken them a while.
I remember SanDisk saying not all that long ago that they wanted to release an 8TB model, but everything seems to have slowed down since then.
I wonder sometimes if all of these companies are not really pushing the tech as fast as it could go because all of them in the meantime can make some decent money selling the various inbetween capacities.
Really it's kinda ridiculous that it's still possible to buy 128GB and lesser models, they're such price ripoffs. I remember that the 850 EVO 250GB went as low as 53 UKP over the xmas break, but now most places have it up past 75, while plenty of 120GB models are more than 50.
Just wish the public would stop buying the overpriced lower grade stuff.
And the reason this isn't being released with U.2 would be.....? Oh that's right! There isn't a reason. It was intentionally gimped with SATA performance. Great job Samsung! And it's only 4 times more expensive than it should be! Yep, I'm very glad that Optane is getting closer. I realize it isn't going to be super cheap at the start but it will be very interesting to see how it changes the landscape and what affect it has on the SSD market.
More than likely they'll be faster, more expensive per GB, and smaller... :p AFAIK it'll compete with PCI-E & M.2 drives so it'll be priced accordingly, and that's ignoring that it'll likely require a whole new platform etc.
Looking at a large capacity EVO as a purposeful gimping is very odd, the controller was originally designed and has always been used as a SATA controller.
You could maybe make that claim of a 2TB 950 Pro or something (if and when it happens)... But it's all but impossible to know how this series' controller would do on a different interface, or if that's even possibly.
It's laziness is what it is. And an attempt to milk more out of their SATA controller design. It's time though for the older technology to go the way of the Dodo. For years we've been hobbled by SATA and it doesn't make sense to me to have huge capacities and slow performance anymore. I'm glad to see Samsung releasing such a high capacity SSD but I'm almost insulted by the fact that so many "new" SSDs are being released based upon older technology and crippled by all of its limitations.
A vast majority of people don't need anything better than SATA, so the R&D to go forth is balanced against that I'm sure... Like it or not, anything PCI-E/M.2/U.2 is still a niche right now... And it'd be a tiny niche if M.2 didn't also happen to be a decent form factor for laptops.
Enthusiasts and power users are basically lucky that the mobile sector kinda spurred some performance innovation for once even if it's also kinda casting a shadow on U.2. Samsung's in it to maximize profits like anyone else...
Unfortunately the manufacturers know that at least for a while the niche status of tech like M.2 will allow them to charge much more for such products, pulling in people who can afford it and are willing to pay the premium. In theory competition should solve this, but sometimes I do wonder about possible pricing collusion when certain products seem to go through a particularly fishy looking price fluctuation.
Gimped with SATA? You do realize everything is CPU-bound unless you're copying to a RAM drive or running a benchmark, right? If you want to speed things up, buy a 6700K and OC it.
I can't wait until price per GB drops some more. Its actually very affordable by that metric but I'd still want to wait for it to drop to around $800 before buying one myself.
It'll be a while, the 2TB is like $600 and has barely dropped by $100 since launching last year... Once those hit $500 or less I could be in for one, unless the 4TB's price has also budged a ton by then. I think the largest capacity always sees the smallest dips tho, specially in this case where competition is non existent.
As long as they're able to sell the drives ok at current prices, it won't change. Indeed, if there's a demand spike then prices can rise, for all vendors (others catch on pretty quick if it's obvious consumers are willing to pay more than they'd estimated).
This happened a few years ago when 256GB SSDs were just beginning to approach the 100 UKP mark for the first time. One particular store started offering Samsung 830 models for a good price (something like 120 each, I forget offhand), they sold *hundreds* of them in just a couple of weeks. No doubt Samsung realised there was simply no need to reduce the current pricing and infact it went back up very soon afterwards, as did other vendors' prices aswell, returning to 140 to 150 UKP levels by the following Spring.
Why would I want to spend $1600 on a 4 TB SSD that only lasts 75 full drive rewrites? That limited drive life makes this an expensive disposable drive. The Samsung 850 Pro has a 10 year warranty. This 4TB 850 EVO won't even last a few years with its limited lifespan. It is useless for video work. You may end up losing valuable video if this dies suddenly.
I went back and checked the Anandtech article for the 850 Pro (rocking 512GB here), and it says 150TB of Endurance, whereas this has 300TB of endurance. Hmmm, the TLC thing still feels wrong to me. Both my 840 Evos performed SO horribly I got rid, and the 850 Pro just so different. And so,my SSD failures to date:
1 x OCZ Indillux shite thing. I'm sure you all remember that drive. 1 x Intel 160GB G1 (doa), replacement strong to this day. 1 x Kingston 60GB whatever 1 x Kingston 120GB whatever 2 x Patriot Wildfire 240GB each (failed ~18 months apart)
I also have an 840 Evo 500GB that I got for 'free', which is giving me no problems, but is used as a 'Steam' disk only, as I in no way trust TLC.
It does vary hugely. I have lots of SSDs I use for benching & system testing, including several dozen OCZ (maybe 50 SSDs total). Only had two problems so far, a SanDisk that went weird during a fw update (which thankfully recovered after a full power disconnect) and a Samsung 840 250GB that went fubar last week for grud knows what reason (stops any system to which it's connected from booting properly). Ironic that I've had a Samsung fail before any of the OCZs I use.
It probably helps that the first thing I do when receiving an SSD is make sure the fw is up to date, which in the case of my numerous Vertex2E/3s means they won't be affected by any earlier problematic bugs. Indeed, I've had several V2Es running in UNIX systems for years at a time with no problems (V2E is ideal for this as it was optimised for OSs that don't support TRIM, ie. back when XP was still common).
Isn't there an error in the specification chart? As far as I know only the lower capacity drives up to 500 GB use the MGX controller. The 1 TB drive uses the MEX controller. Unless something has changed...
Was always interested in a higher capacity M.2 drive for my XPS13. 850 Evo maxed out at 512GB where as the Sandisk X400 was the only reliable one at 1TB.
Amazon has just listed a 850 Evo 1TB M.2 @ 350 USD - So eagerly waiting for an update from Anand in this regards :)
The write endurance is really shit at only 75 writes. How large are the pages, and how much is typical write amplification, or is that already factored in?
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Eden-K121D - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Too Expensive. $999 would have been a sweet spot and a potential option for meZak - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The price will come down. Eventually.Ratman6161 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Doesn't really mater if the price goes down, its still a niche product. The EVO's are great general purpose desktop drives. But the people who need a general purpose desktop drive, mostly don't need 4TB and would not buy one at $500 let alone at $1500. In my case, I've got a 250GB Evo and a 1 TB spinning disk for storage of music, pictures, video etc. So I guess a cheap enough 2 TB SSD could work for me just because it would be marginally easier to not have two separate chunks of storage to deal with...but thats just a marginal increase in convienience. The stuff I have on a spinning disk doesn't really need the performance of an SSD anyway.I know, now someone will jump in with "well I sure need that 4 TB" but I still say that isn't the norm. I really don't believe they will sell very many of these compared to the 1 TB and below even if the price comes down.
Meteor2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I don't need it. But it's exciting to see this progress in SSDs. It'll take a while but mass production will bring the price/size ratio down.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
OTOH lack of competition will probably counter that to an extent... But I'm glad it exists too, if nothing else it might mean more sales on the 2TB. :pleexgx - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
was so funny when i clicked on 25% OP, but really the extra OP is really only needed for places where your writing constantly as normally the drive is Trimmed (most SSD/HDDs life is read then write, unless in a server setup that does lots of writes) the drives normal hidden OP is what 400-500MB ?beginner99 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Agree. This shows that HDDs are here to stay for another decade. The same for 4 TB in form of a HDD can be had for about $130. So that 1/10th of the SSD price and as you said for media files, you don't need an SSD at all.Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Another decade? That seems like a stretch unless you're hoarding BD tips and the like... A decade ago we didn't even have SSDs.joex4444 - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
If you have 4TB of stuff to store and it's mostly media that is accessed infrequently, it would only make sense to buy a 4TB SSD over a 4TB HDD if the prices are comparable. We've technically had SSDs for decades, it's just that they used to be in the millions of dollars per drive rather than $100 or so. Exactly how production will change to make 4TB drives cheaper isn't clear. It could be that we've already reached the lowest price per GB and all that remains is to have that scale linearly. This would mean that if 250GB drives cost $60, then a 4TB drive should cost 16 times that, or $960. Maybe some kind of discount could bring it into the $750 range, but in order to get down to $130 we need significant changes. That would put a 250GB drive on the order of $25.JimmiG - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Of course it's not "needed" right now, but it's nice to see progress. The 6 GB HDD I used in my Pentium system was plenty at the time - I didn't "need" those fancy new 20 GB drives...profquatermass - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
6GB? My first hard drive was 200MB!bug77 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Yeah, if you can get one of these at half the MSRP, it's only $750 :rolleyes:Flunk - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It's only $0.36 a GB, that's pretty cheap.patrickjp93 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
You can get something like the Sandisk Ultra II 1TB for 21 cents/GB.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
But then again why would you? Unless you are starving, and if you are, then you wouldn't be buying SSDs...I can't honestly think of any good reason to buy something other than samsung SSD - they have the most warranty and performance is top notch too, reliability seems to be better too.
FLHerne - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Support and spec compliance. Samsung *still* ship firmware that claims support for queued TRIM ATA commands, but erases data if they're actually used. The consistent response is "Windows doesn't use these commands, we don't support other OS's", never mind that it's part of the SATA spec.(no, the kernel bug they fixed is completely unrelated)
I *hate* manufacturers treating "works in current Windows" as an acceptable spec - it's guaranteed to shoot you in the foot down the line, as everyone saw with Vista. So I bought a SanDisk instead.
FLHerne - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
To clarify, I mean the way Vista broke all the manufacturers' stupid assumptions based on XP's behaviour.Also, the months it took for them to bodge around the performance degradation.
Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Acutally, I hate to back up Microsoft, but they DID say it was a complete re-write of Windows, and that it would not be the same OS at all.It performed horribly with low amounts of RAM, and at the time, the big RAM makers were in collusion over RAM price fixing (look it up), so that is why we saw laptops, with Vista being shipped with 256MB of RAM, which was a mess, I agree.
But someone like myself, who had way more RAM than that, found it to be just fine. And it was way less infected than XP too.
I guess your printer never received a Vista driver then? Too bad.
But for me, and other client workstations with reasonable amounts of installed RAM I oversaw, it worked just fine, from the first day I used it.
Flame away...
kepler- - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Except they lied. Go onto your desktop and try to make a folder called "con". You can't, even on Windows 10, because they are still using code from Windows for Workgroups.There are a few others that (PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1...), which are all legacy Windows device names. They never '"rewrote" anything from the ground up.
Michael Bay - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Oy vey, muh geschafts can`t go into appropriate folders now!Such shoah.
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That's a valid point, and even though majority of the people who buy consumer stuff are gonna use it on windows, it is still no excuse, it is not like samsung doesn't have the resources to dedicate to proper support.Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Linux is the only OS affected. Windows and Mac are fine. Disable Queued TRIM and Sequential TRIM will run. So NBD.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Samsung has horrible warranty support and they have had a few major issues with their SDDs (840 EVO performance degradation).Samus - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Yeah. I had two really sour back to back experiences with Samsung Storage support, one regarding the 840 EVO. After a month of back and fourth communication attempting different firmware updates as support requested, secure erase and reimage, and even trying the drive in another PC as support asked, it was obvious they were in denial of the well documented read performance problem. After RMA they shipped me back another 840 EVO that eventually (after a year) developed the same problems even with the latest firmware update. The problems always come up after a lot of writes like a game install. It wasn't worth the trouble. I would have been happy if they simply replaced the drive with an 850 EVO.Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
The FW update that came out in April completely fixed the issue. I posted several updates on a 840 EVO and an 840 EVO m-sata on Overclock that are fine well over a year since the fix.Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
And they also came out with a fix for the non-EVO 840 recently.Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Did they? That's news to me! To teh Google...Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Huh, go figure, they DID issue an 840 update towards the end of June (2016)... What the heck took so long? I think most people had rightfully assumed the 840 (non EVO) was abandoned, the EVO did come out like 6 months after it.Apparently the issue was also never quite as severe on the 840 non EVO? Did they ever commit to a fix and it got drowned out over time or did that update happen out of the blue? No AT Pipeline post about it either...
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Samsung-Magic...
Palorim12 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I think its because in most cases, it took longer for the issue to appear in the 840. So it would take longer for them to see if a fix fully worked?SetiroN - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Why wouldn't you?When you're talking TBs, that difference translates in HUNDREDS of dollars that I have better use for when Sandisk's performance is already good enough.
This drive only really makes sense in oddly demanding small laptops.
SetiroN - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I mean I understand and agree that Samsungs are the better drives to buy at lower capacities right now, but if you needed 4TB or more you just have to be silly to spend $700 more.Let me say that again: $700.
Oxford Guy - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
"I can't honestly think of any good reason to buy something other than samsung SSD"1) People who were burned by the very poor steady state performance (according to one professional review site) of the original 840 120 GB.
2) People who were burned by the problems with the 840 EVO and who aren't impressed by the kludgy work-around of re-writing data again and again.
3) People who haven't been impressed with generations of BS power consumption specs. It's only recently that we're now seeing ratings for read/write power consumption. Prior to that, though, there generations/years of Samsung SSDs with ".17 watt" power consumption nonsense. This was not only the only thing on their site for SSDs that used plenty of watts when working (like the 830 and 840) — consumers even advised each other in the comments in places like this to choose Samsung because of the very low power consumption (even though the 840 topped the chart here, as I recall, for consuming the most watts when writing).
But, that said, the 850 seems to be the first decent TLC SSD so I'm glad the company has made significant improvement.
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I guess I got lucky, went straight from 830s to 850 EVOs & SM951, have yet to get burnt. Though to be honest, every other SSD OEM out there (including Intel) had at least one catastrophic scenario like the 840's (often worse, resulting in data loss), if not several such scenarios.I'm not completely excusing Samsung, because their handling of the situation wasn't optimal (went from trying to brush it under that rug to a kludgy fix that didn't even cover the non EVO)... But I'm also not holding it against them.
Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
1. They released a fix it a week or two ago.2. completely fixed in April of 2015. Doesn't constantly rewrite data, the new algorithm itself fixes the read speeds and the idle write thing they have is a just in case the algorithm can't fix it.
3. Use desktops, so can't say anything about power consumption.
romrunning - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Sure, the *1TB* Ultra II is cheaper per GB. But show me where I can buy a 4TB Ultra II, and then you'll have an apples-to-apples comparison.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well, you can't, but you can buy 4 1TB, put them in RAID 0 and get 2 GB/sec vs 500 MB/sec from the EVO.So almost the same capacity (it is 960 GB really) at 4 times the speed (and 4 times less reliability ;) for 2/3 of the cost.
quiksilvr - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That is only a viable option if you have a desktop computer or a Thunderbolt external drive enclosure. An initial price of $1499 is a lot but 4TB is ridiculous. And if that price drops to $999, that would be even more bonkers. I remember the days when having just 1TB was that price. The fact that we are at 4 times the capacity for the same price and WAY better performance is nuts.TemjinGold - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
And 4 times the headaches having to deal with the RAID setup.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
And the reliability issue of one device failure trashing all the data, though one could get round this by using four 2TB in RAID10 which wouldn't be so bad, but still a lot of ports, etc.Gigaplex - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'd also need a RAID controller with 4 spare SATA ports.Samus - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
But you could buy 8TB of MLC-based Mushkin Reactor for the price of 4TB of 850 EVO. Then you consider a RAID of Reactors will be 4x the sequential performance of a 850 EVO.And let's face it, with a storage drive like a 4TB SSD, sequential performance is all that really matters unless you actually plan to use it as a boot/system drive.
ACE76 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/memory/39668-mushkin-...I can't wait for this...at $500 for 4tb, I'd move all my media over to SSDs in a RAID 10 array.
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
We got clarification from Mushkin at the time when we posted similar: the $500 price point was actually a mischaracterization. The initial price would be much closer to $1000, with $500 being a goal nearer EOL.Oxford Guy - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
How does TRIM fit into the picture of RAIDed ssds, though?Impulses - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
TRIM has been working on RAID for a while, years actually, at least on Intel's newer chipsets... They kept it from older chipsets (like my old rig's P67) but enterprising users back ported it thru BIOS edits/hacks.Impulses - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Not that I'm against the EVOs, running 2x 1TB in RAID myself.bittermann - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Good luck fitting 4TB of data on that 1TB drive....Spoogie - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
With Optane on the horizon, no reason to bite at this price point.Flunk - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I don't think it's the same market. Optane isn't going to be less than $1 a GB at the start.patrickjp93 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
65 cents/GB actually.nandnandnand - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Weren't the first XPoint parts going to be 16-32 GB? I find $0.65/GB hard to believe... I expect $3.00/GB.nathanddrews - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Where are you seeing this and for what format?I strongly suspect that Intel is going to be price competitive in the NVMe space so that's realistic but I'd expect a massive premium for Xpoint in DIMM format when Skylake-E comes around.
shabby - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Why would xpoint dimm be premium priced? They said its slower than dimm, so it should be cheaper.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well what competition would the DIMM format have on SkyLake-E?SATA based SSDs are a dime a dozen and M.2 drives using NVMe are just starting to spread. What competition would Intel have with a DIMM format?
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
There's a lot of pie in the sky dreaming about Xpoint IMO... Why would it be priced at a premium? Same reason M.2 NVMe & PCI-E drives are, it's what the market will bear that counts. If it's any faster it'll be more expensive, simple really.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Don't hold your breath. They made claims of "ram" speed, but demoed 2 GB/s hardware, which is not much faster than nvme SSDs. Ram is 20-30 GB/s...SSDs can still go a long way in terms of bandwidth - just snap more chips on more channels, given an available interface to hook it to, it would be too much trouble for the industry to create something like 8 GB/s SSD. And it only requires a better controller chip, can work with the same old flash memory chips. Currently, M2 can only provide theoretical 4 GB/s bandwidth, running at 32 gbit.
Eden-K121D - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
a PCIe gen4 device could have potential read speeds of 8GB/sKevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The 2 GB/s demo was using a Thunderbolt enclosure and an M.2 prototype.Full size PCIe and DIMM formats are planned so I'd consider that 2 GB demo the starting point.
benedict - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Horrible write endurance. If you need a drive that big you certainly have enough data to fill it 75 times.JellyRoll - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It is relative. 75 total drive writes of 4TB are huge.Daniel Egger - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Not at all. There're many scenarios where one would chose a larger drive without immediate need. In fact I'd never take a drive I can immediately fill up a 100%, what'd be the point in that? Also this is a consumer drive and how many customers do you know *writing* away TB after TB, many kinds of data are actually write-once-read-often...My laptop SSD has been powered on for pretty much exactly two years now and seen 10TB writes per year. My home VM server sees 9.2 TB writes per year. So pretty much harmless and those two cases are already very much non-consumer scenarios...
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
If you really do a lot of writing, say you work with RAW 4k video, then you really don't care that much about latency, all you care about is bandwidth and capacity. In this case, what you really need is a good RAID controller and a dozen of good old HDDs.vladx - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
This drive is not suited for 4K video work, everyone knows that. Using an EVO for that kind of work iwould be very irresponsible and failure is 100% in the hands of the user .Oxford Guy - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'll agree with you if there is a big red sticker on the box that says that.vladx - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
@Oxford Guy: And this why we get people ranting about SSDs when it's their own fault for being ignorant.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Indeed and at this point you'd want a fast NVMe drive for high quality 4k captures.A 4 TB SATA SSD does have utility as a means to provide storage for an assort of cameras and equipment build around SATA drives. There are a lot of those out there mainly because U.2 hasn't taken hold (yet?).
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Who captures video to PC LOL. Who logs a computer along with a camera.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Some high end cine cameras actually capture straight to SSDImpulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Pretty sure he meant it as in 'working with 4K' anyway.Lolimaster - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
If you "work" with 4k raw videos you can afford the enterprise level SSD's with their multi petabyte endurance rating.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Exactly. I know someone who's been testing 8K editing at a movie company, he was able to get over 8GB/sec from a good Enterprise PCIe device, with consistent performance being absolutely critical. He did try RAIDs of 850 Pros but they just couldn't handle it.AnnonymousCoward - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Look at the graph on this page...the Samsung showed bad sectors 4 times earlier than the others: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-enduran...3 things matter to me with SSDs: cost, reliability, and UX performance.
DPUser - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That was 2-D TLC. The 850 uses much more robust 3-D NAND.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
I guess we need updated data then :)ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well, that's the 840 pro - old stuff... Also, it is possible that samsung have more strict criteria of when a sector becomes unreliable and requires reallocation.Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
But in the end, didn't the 840 Pro outlast all the other drives?hojnikb - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That endurance rating is simply for segmentation purposes. In reality, drive should easily reach 4PB+ of writes, before crapping out.mdw9604 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Can you explain? I'd like to buy one for a project I am working on, if this is true.mdw9604 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
I agree. I know its EVO...but write endurance on a drive that expensive is pretty bad.jardows2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
What is the use case for this drive? $1500 for mass storage? Price per GB may be comparable to smaller drives, but that is still a huge chunk of change to get, what?It's a consumer drive, not an Enterprise drive. Video and Photo editors are going to hit it hard, so the lower endurance rating is going to hurt it for use in those applications. All I can see is that it is a halo product to push the industry forward, purchased only by those who have lots of spare cash to spend. Am I missing something?
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
RAW photos, audio, video, basically any kind of data acquisition - those eat a lot of capacity. At 1500$ I'd argue this is not a consumer but a prosumer product.vladx - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
This type of product is for people rich enough to not care about the price. Simple as that.MScrip - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'd say video editing. It's not uncommon to come home with a terabyte of footage from multiple 4K cameras over multiple days of shooting. And you may be editing multiple projects at a time.This would make a hell of a media drive... fast and local.
And when you're done with the projects... you move them to slower mass storage for safekeeping.
jardows2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
My point being, if you are a hobbyist, $1500 is a huge entry point, especially when the, albeit slow, hard drives come in a just a couple hundred dollars.If you are a professional, you are going to want Enterprise level drives with the endurance and warranty support. But if you are using multiple cameras shooting 4K footage, you probably have so much invested there, that $1500 for a storage drive isn't a huge percentage of the overall equipment budget. For me, I'm just using a 1080p camcorder for now, so my budget is way lower!
MScrip - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'm mostly 1080p... with occasional 4K. I don't need this 4TB drive... but I've got my eye on the 1TB version. Right now I'm editing on a 1TB WD Black... and its slowness shows!Is $1500 expensive? It depends. It's just a bigger version of the 2TB model... which is a bigger version of the 1TB model... etc.
Drives in higher capacities always cost more money... especially the first of its kind (4TB in a single SSD)
Asking "who is this for?" is usually a difficult question. My best guess... I'd say it's for someone who wants a single SSD... but needs to hold more than 2TB. :)
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Moved to 2x 1TB 850 EVOs myself a while back (with an SM951 256GB for OS/apps), can't wait until the higher capacities come down in price... Depending on how much of a premium the 4TB sustains over time I could see myself adding one (or two) 2TB or just going straight to 4TB.Mostly working with 1080p and relatively small 16MP RAWs... Bought the 1TB before the 2TB was readily available but I don't really regret that bit, higher seqs when going to the SM951 and easier to repurpose them later on.
Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
One use case, which is admittedly niche: musicians using virtual instruments.Instrument sample libraries can run into the multi-gigabyte range (have ~2gb in total myself, and I'm only a hobbyist), and are built up of recordings of instruments playing single notes in various volumes, styles, etc., depending on the library's level of detail sometimes recordings of the transitions between notes.
Less detailed virtual instruments may only eat up a few hundred MB in samples; it's not a huge deal to load the entire thing into memory for those. However, more detailed ones can run in the tens of GB's per instrument for all the different layers, and once you start building up an entire virtual orchestra, you will have to resort to loading them from the disk during playback, and for that you require something with low latency and high throughput... hence the use of SSD's. Don't even need the write endurance in a case like this, even.
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Nah, you really want samples loaded in RAM. RAM is cheap, even a modest DAW system will have at least 16 gigs of ram. Latency really matters here, and RAM latency is much, much lower than SSD, and sample libraries aren't that big. Sure, there are a few libraries in excess of 30 GB, but you really use a much smaller subset of the whole thing at a time.Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It really depends on which sample libraries you're using, and some of the big ones get quite huge. The (perhaps now mere) 32gb RAM on my system only can hold so much, especially with some of the big EastWest libraries.The other advantage of course, is that I can load my entire template in a matter of a couple of minutes instead of waiting 15 minutes for it to load off a regular HDD.
Enigmatica - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Silh is right. My DAW system has 64GB of RAM and all of my samples are stored on a 400GB Intel PCIe NVME drive. I'm only a hobbyist but my set of samples is well into the 200GB range. Pros with all of the gear can easily break 1+ TBddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Pros are actually invested in making music than obsessing with sample hoarding ;)NI KOMPLETE is 100 GB and it has pretty much everything you are ever going to need. Naturally, that means actual analog instruments. A lot of mediocre pseudo musicians obsess on hoarding what is not instrument samples but ready to use loops they can play and imagine they are doing music. The format of distribution of that stuff is as stupid as it is itself - since it is not really live performance and usually synthesized sound, it could just as well be distributed as midi + synthesizer presets, and take kilobytes rather than gigabytes - a million times less space...
smilingcrow - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Classic “I know what’s best for everybody” rant by someone that fails to understand the topic they are discussing.DPUser - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Smilingcrow is right on point here. While ddriver's words may accurately convey the mindset of a certain subset of "musicians" using computers, VI orchestrators and pro producers in many genres are not just using loops; describing these writers, arrangers, performers and engineers as "pseudo musicians" indicates a complete lack comprehension as to how these extremely talented folks work.And while is NI Komplete is wonderful, it is not (yet, if ever) the be all and end all. Incredible VIs are being developed every day by other developers, bringing new levels of fidelity and expression, making greater demands on system real-time performance and soaking up ever-increasing swaths of storage space.
Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Have a look at some of the professional orchestral libraries. These are not loops, or instrument runs, but individual note samples, recorded with multiple articulations, velocity layers, different mic positions, etc. You're looking at at 300GB+ for, say, just the strings. VSL's full orchestra comes in about 1TB if you put everything together (and priced waaaaaaaay out of what I can afford).Daniel Egger - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
RAW Photo editing is harmless: you import all data once and from then on it's mostly reading data. Even if you're a pro you'll have a hard time filling 4x64GB cards a day and you certainly won't sustain that throughout a year. So even if you believed in that segment-my-ass 300TB endurance figure you'll be using it for 3 or 4 years...ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Sure, editing involves mostly reading, you edit the photos then throw away the changes. But even then, photoshop will generate tens of gigabytes of temporary scratch files ;)smilingcrow - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
A prosumer would be using a separate scratch disk with Photoshop though if they wanted top performance.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Cheap(er) SATA drives for RAWs here (2x1TB EVO atm), SM951 for the apps and their libraries/scratch.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Keep posting your sensible example config, I like that. 8)ACE76 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/memory/39668-mushkin-...Wait for this....any company that releases something first, price gouges.
JellyRoll - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The "21nm" is the BL half pitch. The EE Times article does not say that they shrunk from 40 to 21 for the overall measurement.Billy Tallis - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Yep, I misinterpreted that. They haven't changed the lithography, but they've shrunk some parts of the die through other means.amayii - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Why wasn't the Samsung 950pro taken into account in the benchmark?Is is because it is a NVMe SSD?Solidstate89 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Of course that's the reason. We all know a PCI-e/M.2 SSD (whether it uses NVMe or not) will blow the pants off any SATA SSD when it comes to performance numbers.There is no reason to compare them.
amayii - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Ok, thanks!Samus - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
This drive cost more than my whole PC :/Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Ha ha, thanks for putting it into perspective!Made me smile.
doggface - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I would hope that when a manufacturer moves to a new process there would be a corresponding drop in $/GB. To be moving to 48layer and still charging ~30c is worrying. Needs to be a third of that to be anything other than a wet dream for consumer.The theorised ssd takeover of HDDs doesnt seem to be materialising yet.
Kristian Vättö - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
A new process doesn't mean immediate cost savings. It takes time for yields to mature and even then 48L has more process steps than 32L. Ultimately it's a game of economics. Why would you sell something for 10c when the competition is charging 30c? For companies it's always all about the profit.Adm_SkyWalker - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
At CES Mushkin said they were planning on releasing a 4TB SSD by the end of the year. They are targeting a $500 price point. Unless they scrapped it, this could be a cheaper option before the end of the year.http://techreport.com/news/29583/mushkin-previews-...
http://techreport.com/news/29583/mushkin-previews-...
Kristian Vättö - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It was a misinterpretation. The $500 price point was for the 2TB drive, with the price of the 4TB being unannounced (likely a double at least).http://www.anandtech.com/comments/9986/ces-2016-ro...
Adm_SkyWalker - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
I should of figured it was to good to be true. Still a competing $1000 drive could convince Samsung to lower their price. Assuming the speed is comparable between the two.aggiechase37 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Way WAY WAAAAYYY too expensive. For this price you could get piece together a RAID configuration out of regular HDD and get a decent amount of the same performance AND the added bonus of having redundancy in the case of a drive failure. Can't see who purchases this.Chloiber - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Not sure why anyone would want to buy this when you can get a 4TB Samsung P863 Enterprise SSD for 300$ more...Taracta - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Isn't the 25% over-provisioning getting a bit much for these larger SSDs? Does a 4TB SSD really need 1TB over-provisioning to max-out relative performance? Would 10% be enough for these large drives?Billy Tallis - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That is something I've wondered about and will probably look in to eventually, but it would be pretty time consuming to test and isn't something I can see adding to the routine suite of benchmarks.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Something to ask Samsung tho?Taracta - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Thanks for your reply. I believe that you should just test this 4TB SSD for now to see the impact and another couple of different ~4TB SSDs when available to compare with these results. Forget about the lesser drives, too many and too late.ACE76 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
hopefully we see more manufacturers release 4tb and greater SSDs...these drives will end the need for platter based hard drives for good...price is too high right now but it should come down over the next 6 months to a year.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I think it might take longer than that, the 1TB model hasn't budged much in the year since I bought 2, and neither has the 2TB after it's release... A 4TB faces even less direct competition than those do. I guess 3D NAND from others will eventually start to challenge Samsung tho, but it sure has taken them a while.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
I remember SanDisk saying not all that long ago that they wanted to release an 8TB model, but everything seems to have slowed down since then.I wonder sometimes if all of these companies are not really pushing the tech as fast as it could go because all of them in the meantime can make some decent money selling the various inbetween capacities.
Really it's kinda ridiculous that it's still possible to buy 128GB and lesser models, they're such price ripoffs. I remember that the 850 EVO 250GB went as low as 53 UKP over the xmas break, but now most places have it up past 75, while plenty of 120GB models are more than 50.
Just wish the public would stop buying the overpriced lower grade stuff.
Magichands8 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
And the reason this isn't being released with U.2 would be.....? Oh that's right! There isn't a reason. It was intentionally gimped with SATA performance. Great job Samsung! And it's only 4 times more expensive than it should be! Yep, I'm very glad that Optane is getting closer. I realize it isn't going to be super cheap at the start but it will be very interesting to see how it changes the landscape and what affect it has on the SSD market.Impulses - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
More than likely they'll be faster, more expensive per GB, and smaller... :p AFAIK it'll compete with PCI-E & M.2 drives so it'll be priced accordingly, and that's ignoring that it'll likely require a whole new platform etc.Looking at a large capacity EVO as a purposeful gimping is very odd, the controller was originally designed and has always been used as a SATA controller.
You could maybe make that claim of a 2TB 950 Pro or something (if and when it happens)... But it's all but impossible to know how this series' controller would do on a different interface, or if that's even possibly.
Magichands8 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
It's laziness is what it is. And an attempt to milk more out of their SATA controller design. It's time though for the older technology to go the way of the Dodo. For years we've been hobbled by SATA and it doesn't make sense to me to have huge capacities and slow performance anymore. I'm glad to see Samsung releasing such a high capacity SSD but I'm almost insulted by the fact that so many "new" SSDs are being released based upon older technology and crippled by all of its limitations.Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
A vast majority of people don't need anything better than SATA, so the R&D to go forth is balanced against that I'm sure... Like it or not, anything PCI-E/M.2/U.2 is still a niche right now... And it'd be a tiny niche if M.2 didn't also happen to be a decent form factor for laptops.Enthusiasts and power users are basically lucky that the mobile sector kinda spurred some performance innovation for once even if it's also kinda casting a shadow on U.2. Samsung's in it to maximize profits like anyone else...
mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Unfortunately the manufacturers know that at least for a while the niche status of tech like M.2 will allow them to charge much more for such products, pulling in people who can afford it and are willing to pay the premium. In theory competition should solve this, but sometimes I do wonder about possible pricing collusion when certain products seem to go through a particularly fishy looking price fluctuation.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Gimped with SATA? You do realize everything is CPU-bound unless you're copying to a RAM drive or running a benchmark, right? If you want to speed things up, buy a 6700K and OC it.KoolAidMan1 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I can't wait until price per GB drops some more. Its actually very affordable by that metric but I'd still want to wait for it to drop to around $800 before buying one myself.Impulses - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
It'll be a while, the 2TB is like $600 and has barely dropped by $100 since launching last year... Once those hit $500 or less I could be in for one, unless the 4TB's price has also budged a ton by then. I think the largest capacity always sees the smallest dips tho, specially in this case where competition is non existent.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
As long as they're able to sell the drives ok at current prices, it won't change. Indeed, if there's a demand spike then prices can rise, for all vendors (others catch on pretty quick if it's obvious consumers are willing to pay more than they'd estimated).This happened a few years ago when 256GB SSDs were just beginning to approach the 100 UKP mark for the first time. One particular store started offering Samsung 830 models for a good price (something like 120 each, I forget offhand), they sold *hundreds* of them in just a couple of weeks. No doubt Samsung realised there was simply no need to reduce the current pricing and infact it went back up very soon afterwards, as did other vendors' prices aswell, returning to 140 to 150 UKP levels by the following Spring.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Just checked, the 830 256GB offer price in late 2012 was 130 each (from ebuyer IIRC); I bought two. I think they sold well over a thousand units.jameskatt - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Why would I want to spend $1600 on a 4 TB SSD that only lasts 75 full drive rewrites? That limited drive life makes this an expensive disposable drive. The Samsung 850 Pro has a 10 year warranty. This 4TB 850 EVO won't even last a few years with its limited lifespan. It is useless for video work. You may end up losing valuable video if this dies suddenly.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Yes, this was my first thought too.I went back and checked the Anandtech article for the 850 Pro (rocking 512GB here), and it says 150TB of Endurance, whereas this has 300TB of endurance. Hmmm, the TLC thing still feels wrong to me. Both my 840 Evos performed SO horribly I got rid, and the 850 Pro just so different. And so,my SSD failures to date:
1 x OCZ Indillux shite thing. I'm sure you all remember that drive.
1 x Intel 160GB G1 (doa), replacement strong to this day.
1 x Kingston 60GB whatever
1 x Kingston 120GB whatever
2 x Patriot Wildfire 240GB each (failed ~18 months apart)
I also have an 840 Evo 500GB that I got for 'free', which is giving me no problems, but is used as a 'Steam' disk only, as I in no way trust TLC.
Make a 4TB Pro at $699, and I'll take two of 'em.
Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
I've been pretty darn lucky... My desktop progression:80GB Intel X25-M
40GB Intel X25-V (for a netbook)
2x 128GB Samsung 830 (ran separately then later RAID)
2x 1TB Samsung 850 EVO + 256GB SM951
0 issues :P
mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
It does vary hugely. I have lots of SSDs I use for benching & system testing, including several dozen OCZ (maybe 50 SSDs total). Only had two problems so far, a SanDisk that went weird during a fw update (which thankfully recovered after a full power disconnect) and a Samsung 840 250GB that went fubar last week for grud knows what reason (stops any system to which it's connected from booting properly). Ironic that I've had a Samsung fail before any of the OCZs I use.It probably helps that the first thing I do when receiving an SSD is make sure the fw is up to date, which in the case of my numerous Vertex2E/3s means they won't be affected by any earlier problematic bugs. Indeed, I've had several V2Es running in UNIX systems for years at a time with no problems (V2E is ideal for this as it was optimised for OSs that don't support TRIM, ie. back when XP was still common).
Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
I could also have added 1x Intel X25-E 64GB still going strong to this day too.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
Sorry, I left out, make 'em at 4TB @ 699, and I'll not only take two of 'em, I'll RAID1 them! Given they are TLC...vladimirovich - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
$1500 for this TLC shit, enjoy!! :)azrael- - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Isn't there an error in the specification chart? As far as I know only the lower capacity drives up to 500 GB use the MGX controller. The 1 TB drive uses the MEX controller. Unless something has changed...no_nonsense4857 - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Was always interested in a higher capacity M.2 drive for my XPS13. 850 Evo maxed out at 512GB where as the Sandisk X400 was the only reliable one at 1TB.Amazon has just listed a 850 Evo 1TB M.2 @ 350 USD - So eagerly waiting for an update from Anand in this regards :)
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-Internal-MZ...
zodiacfml - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Though SATA interface is limiting the performance of such drives, isnt Random performance has more room to grow?hMunster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
The write endurance is really shit at only 75 writes. How large are the pages, and how much is typical write amplification, or is that already factored in?NomadXL - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
So this new 850 EVO 4TB has a 300 Endurance.. and the previous one of 2TB aswell?I thought the 2TB model had only a 150TB endurance rating..
Please can somebody confirm this?
centaur1 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Any idea of external cases that this will work with? Thunderbolt?