Samsung 850 PRO 1TB SSD
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,309 words · ~6 min read
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we don't often do videos about ssds anymore I mean look at them I don't
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think Samsung has done anything visually interesting to their SSD lineup since
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they ever so why would we make a video
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about the 850 Pro well because we've got
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four of
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them also there's some really cool technology in them that I think is worth
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talking about
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d skill's new rip Jaws 4 Series is their ultimate ddr4 memory with speeds of up
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to 3,333 MHz available click now to learn
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more no but seriously this video isn't meant to be so much a review as a behind
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the scenes look at what we're using for the storage for the server that hosts
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the linch tips.com community forum and more importantly why we made that choice
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now a huge part of the story here is the Nan Flash actual storage chips on the
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drives the introduction of the 850 Pro marked the first retail availability of
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a drive using vertical or 3D nand this
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comes with a couple of significant benefits so typically the way that flash
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and microprocessors get cheaper over time is that after significant research
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and expense clever folks like Intel and Samsung move to smaller and smaller
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manufacturing processes to allow them to build the same device with less raw
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material or more advanced devices with the same amount of raw material
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increasing performance and lowering overall costs in the long run the
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problem with this is that for Flash in particular as it gets more and more
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dense its performance drops and so does
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its endurance the number of times it can be written to before it's not reliable
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anymore so for several generations of ssds much of the performance and
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warranty Improvement that we've seen has been from among other things SSD
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manufacturers finding ways of using wear
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leveling to cleverly spread the load out across all the chips in a drive or even
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making the best use of limited flash performance with voodoo magic like on
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thefly data compression and decompression but now here comes
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vertical Nan to the rescue so by stacking layers instead of spreading
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them out two dimensionally Samsung can achieve the density and therefore
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capacity that they need these are one tab drives we're using while using a
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bigger manufacturing process this ends up using nearly the same raw material in
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manufacturing but gives back some of the performance and reliability that
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advanced SSD controllers have been compensating for over the last few years
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with the voodoo magic I mentioned before Samsung then turns around and pairs this
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faster more reliable flash with a modern
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Advanced Three core controller and up to a gig of low power ddr2 for cash and
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voila the 50 Pro is about as fast as a
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SATA 3 SSD can be while being rated even
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at its lowest capacity to handle 40 gigs
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per day of Rights for the entire duration of its 10-year warranty which
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isn't merely as impressive as the 128 gig Drive Samsung says they've had in
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their lab for uh over 8,000 terabytes of
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Rights and it just keeps going and then I guess on top of that you also get
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support for Rapid their SSD acceleration
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with sort of RAM cache thing that can be enabled through the SSD magician
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monitoring and tweaking utility full drive encryption support and Samsung's
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easy to use cloning software so all of
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that out of the way what are we using these for well right now in the server
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we're running Western Digital re series Enterprise grade hard drives for the
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Forum software and the database and we've discovered some interesting issues
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isues especially when we launch giveaways and contests in spite of CPU
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load being quite manageable we've been getting some weird issues
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oops okay I'mma put these boxes here
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where they'll be safe sort of um back on
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topic so we've discovered some interesting issues whenever we launch
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giveaways and contests in spite of pretty manageable CPU load we've been
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getting some weird issues with errors during account creation as people are
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rushing to make accounts and join these giveaways and we narrowed that down to a
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storage performance limitation so that
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is where the 850 pros come in starting when these get deployed the entire Linus
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Tech tips.com site will be solid state based we know that while unlike
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Samsung's Enterprise grade Solutions these prosumer drives don't offer ENT to
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end data protection or power loss protection but our system uses a battery
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backup to protect against unexpected shutdowns and having data loss due to
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that so we're willing to risk using consumer grade Hardware um in order to
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get the raw performance and reliability that we'll get with 850 Pros as well as
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the capacity and price so sort of balancing all those things now in the
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server we'll be using our four drives responsibly one will be for the
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operating system two will be for the database in a raid one setup for
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protection from Hardware failure and a fourth will be a periodic manual copy
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from The Raid one so actually triple redundancy but since we had Samsung send
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the drives to us to forward to the data center we figured why not see exactly
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how much performance could be extracted from them if we decided to go crazy and
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build a 4 tbte raid zero array the
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answer is well over 1 GB per second and
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here's some Crystal disc Mark and as SSD numbers for the SSD Geeks out there but
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one thing that disappointed me a little bit here nothing to do with the drives
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is that while they're capable of much more than this it looks like Intel's
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onboard RAID controller is still a bottleneck for such a high throughput
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configuration even on x99 the good news
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is that for people running more reasonable two or three Drive raid zero
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configs Intel's raid driver passes through the trim command to keep it
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running at Peak efficiency so aside from the reliability concerns of raid zero
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remember one drive fails all the array data is lost it's a somewhat viable
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configuration for SSD users that allows them to overcome the bottleneck that is
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the SATA 3 interface until they bump up against the next bottleneck in the
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system at which point it might be time to go m.2 or SATA Express or whatever
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else the case may be anyway this was fun
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while it lasted but it's time to send these to our Forum host so we can start
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delivering you guys even better website performance and if you haven't checked
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it out already you guys should head over to linch tips.com we've got a great
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community over there discussing Tech and gaming and all the stuff that goes on on
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the internet these days anyway thank you for watching this video like this video
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if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know
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um how amazing one tab ssds in ra zero
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or like rub my face on them or whatever
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it is people comment on YouTube videos check out the link in the video description if you want to support us
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just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so whenever you
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watching and as always don't forget to subscribe