we don't often do videos about ssds anymore I mean look at them I don't
think Samsung has done anything visually interesting to their SSD lineup since
they ever so why would we make a video
about the 850 Pro well because we've got
four of
them also there's some really cool technology in them that I think is worth
talking about
d skill's new rip Jaws 4 Series is their ultimate ddr4 memory with speeds of up
to 3,333 MHz available click now to learn
more no but seriously this video isn't meant to be so much a review as a behind
the scenes look at what we're using for the storage for the server that hosts
the linch tips.com community forum and more importantly why we made that choice
now a huge part of the story here is the Nan Flash actual storage chips on the
drives the introduction of the 850 Pro marked the first retail availability of
a drive using vertical or 3D nand this
comes with a couple of significant benefits so typically the way that flash
and microprocessors get cheaper over time is that after significant research
and expense clever folks like Intel and Samsung move to smaller and smaller
manufacturing processes to allow them to build the same device with less raw
material or more advanced devices with the same amount of raw material
increasing performance and lowering overall costs in the long run the
problem with this is that for Flash in particular as it gets more and more
dense its performance drops and so does
its endurance the number of times it can be written to before it's not reliable
anymore so for several generations of ssds much of the performance and
warranty Improvement that we've seen has been from among other things SSD
manufacturers finding ways of using wear
leveling to cleverly spread the load out across all the chips in a drive or even
making the best use of limited flash performance with voodoo magic like on
thefly data compression and decompression but now here comes
vertical Nan to the rescue so by stacking layers instead of spreading
them out two dimensionally Samsung can achieve the density and therefore
capacity that they need these are one tab drives we're using while using a
bigger manufacturing process this ends up using nearly the same raw material in
manufacturing but gives back some of the performance and reliability that
advanced SSD controllers have been compensating for over the last few years
with the voodoo magic I mentioned before Samsung then turns around and pairs this
faster more reliable flash with a modern
Advanced Three core controller and up to a gig of low power ddr2 for cash and
voila the 50 Pro is about as fast as a
SATA 3 SSD can be while being rated even
at its lowest capacity to handle 40 gigs
per day of Rights for the entire duration of its 10-year warranty which
isn't merely as impressive as the 128 gig Drive Samsung says they've had in
their lab for uh over 8,000 terabytes of
Rights and it just keeps going and then I guess on top of that you also get
support for Rapid their SSD acceleration
with sort of RAM cache thing that can be enabled through the SSD magician
monitoring and tweaking utility full drive encryption support and Samsung's
easy to use cloning software so all of
that out of the way what are we using these for well right now in the server
we're running Western Digital re series Enterprise grade hard drives for the
Forum software and the database and we've discovered some interesting issues
isues especially when we launch giveaways and contests in spite of CPU
load being quite manageable we've been getting some weird issues
oops okay I'mma put these boxes here
where they'll be safe sort of um back on
topic so we've discovered some interesting issues whenever we launch
giveaways and contests in spite of pretty manageable CPU load we've been
getting some weird issues with errors during account creation as people are
rushing to make accounts and join these giveaways and we narrowed that down to a
storage performance limitation so that
is where the 850 pros come in starting when these get deployed the entire Linus
Tech tips.com site will be solid state based we know that while unlike
Samsung's Enterprise grade Solutions these prosumer drives don't offer ENT to
end data protection or power loss protection but our system uses a battery
backup to protect against unexpected shutdowns and having data loss due to
that so we're willing to risk using consumer grade Hardware um in order to
get the raw performance and reliability that we'll get with 850 Pros as well as
the capacity and price so sort of balancing all those things now in the
server we'll be using our four drives responsibly one will be for the
operating system two will be for the database in a raid one setup for
protection from Hardware failure and a fourth will be a periodic manual copy
from The Raid one so actually triple redundancy but since we had Samsung send
the drives to us to forward to the data center we figured why not see exactly
how much performance could be extracted from them if we decided to go crazy and
build a 4 tbte raid zero array the
answer is well over 1 GB per second and
here's some Crystal disc Mark and as SSD numbers for the SSD Geeks out there but
one thing that disappointed me a little bit here nothing to do with the drives
is that while they're capable of much more than this it looks like Intel's
onboard RAID controller is still a bottleneck for such a high throughput
configuration even on x99 the good news
is that for people running more reasonable two or three Drive raid zero
configs Intel's raid driver passes through the trim command to keep it
running at Peak efficiency so aside from the reliability concerns of raid zero
remember one drive fails all the array data is lost it's a somewhat viable
configuration for SSD users that allows them to overcome the bottleneck that is
the SATA 3 interface until they bump up against the next bottleneck in the
system at which point it might be time to go m.2 or SATA Express or whatever
else the case may be anyway this was fun
while it lasted but it's time to send these to our Forum host so we can start
delivering you guys even better website performance and if you haven't checked
it out already you guys should head over to linch tips.com we've got a great
community over there discussing Tech and gaming and all the stuff that goes on on
the internet these days anyway thank you for watching this video like this video
if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know
um how amazing one tab ssds in ra zero
or like rub my face on them or whatever
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