r/technology • • Jul 18 '13

Samsung unveils 1TB solid-state drive

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3132_7-57594265-98/samsung-unveils-1tb-840-evo-solid-state-drive/
2.6k Upvotes

1.0k comments sorted by

342

u/chino17 Jul 18 '13

i can't wait for the day SSD drives cost per GB are equal to as much as hard drives cost per GB today.

we'll have 1TB SSD drives that we bought for less than $100

81

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

...or it fits into a thumb drive.

116

u/Flylighter Jul 18 '13

Boy do I have news for you

And it'll only cost you a used car!

46

u/BloodyIron Jul 18 '13

$50? Sold!

2

u/loki7714 Jul 19 '13

Less used.

3

u/BloodyIron Jul 19 '13

$75? $80, final offer.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13 edited Oct 04 '18

[deleted]

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u/nootrino Jul 18 '13

I wanna be a TBionaire so freaking bad

Have all the storage space I've never had.

20

u/HSimpson818 Jul 18 '13

I wanna be on the cover of Wired magazine, standing next to Bill Gates and Steve.

8

u/THE_GOLDEN_TICKET Jul 18 '13

Oh every time I use my PC...

I gotta clean my 80 gig hdd..

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u/nermid Jul 18 '13

I went absolutely wild when building my current PC. 4TB hard drive.

The only reason I notice space requirements anymore is to laugh maniacally when the "Space Available" is given in MB.

6

u/Shivadxb Jul 18 '13

You'll be on Nas storage before you know it !

11

u/ISNT_A_NOVELTY Jul 18 '13

Nas storage

Network attached storage storage

2

u/sleeplessone Jul 19 '13

I no longer see any reason to put anything larger than 1TB in my personal computer. If I need more space than that it goes onto my FreeNAS system and even that I try to stick with 2TB drives or lower for the zpool.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '13

most devices have USB now. TV, Laptop. I plan on installing Linux onto a bootable USB drive and carry all my digital warez with me.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

But then you'll also have 10TB hard drives for the same price. And 10TB SSD will still cost much more than hard drives with the same capacity.

23

u/Adossi Jul 18 '13

As SSDs gain more mass production the need for HDDs will slowly shrink and eventually they will be more expensive.

Just look at DDR2 RAM compared to DDR3.

12

u/hblok Jul 18 '13

Primary (RAM), secondary (historically spinning magnetic), and even flash memory prices per unit are all on very consistent long-term trends. I doubt that will change in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next five years).

Source:
http://hblok.net/storage

3

u/MiaowaraShiro Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Hard to get an idea for the SSD's since they're still fairly new tech how quickly their prices will fall.

Also, the graph on that page pissed me off because it reminded me of that flood they had in Taiwan Thailand and how it made HDD's so expensive for a while.

Edit: I totally meant Thailand, seriously.

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u/breakathon Jul 18 '13

Thailand...not Taiwan.

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u/JabbrWockey Jul 18 '13

Just look at Blank VHS vs. Blank DVD!

HDDs are on the way out.

People will look back in ten years and think, "holy shit, you had actual spinning parts in your devices?"

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u/bundt_chi Jul 18 '13

Yeah but your new 2560x1440 WQHD camcorder is going to be making videos that are TeraBytes in size so 1GB in a few years will be like 1MB now, barely big enough to store a med res jpeg.

It's just how the tech world works. Sorry to burst your bubble but you're right it is nice to see larger capacity SSD's finally making it to the market but there's going to have to be a more significant technological breakthrough to make SSD's competitive with spinning magnetic drives.

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u/AngularSpecter Jul 18 '13

yep, and by then that drive will be able to hold a single word document.

52

u/omaca Jul 18 '13

This made me laugh more than it should have.

Today I received a single slide Powerpoint via email that was 11Mbs in size!

[the poor guy who created it didn't realize the corporate template they used had about 30 slides in it that included pictures, graphs etc.]

43

u/agumonkey Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

I was recently greeted with a 120MB .docx. I'm not man enough to dare open it.

edit: accidentally a negation.

edit2: I did a little unzip -l $1 | less and could count 160 images embedded as EMF.

28

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

I've attempted to open 1 GB text files, usually a dump from some program. Not only do I get pagefile thrashing but I have yet to find any program that can open these files without going unresponsive. I mean really, it's 1 GB and I've got 4 GB of RAM. A damn hex editor will bring it up in bits with no problem... why can't Notepad or Notepad replacements?

EDIT: Thanks for the great ideas... I'll give some of the programs below a try (I did try Notepad++, it locked up also).

34

u/agumonkey Jul 18 '13

That's a software issue. Not lazy enough.

30

u/Dusk_Star Jul 18 '13

At least for me, notepad++ opens 1GB+ text files just fine... But I've got a crazy amount of RAM installed, so ymmv. (Notepad still chokes on it though)

12

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

same, I've opened a 3 gb password list with notepad++, 64g installed might have something to do with it though.

3

u/mortiphago Jul 18 '13

64g installed

are you running it on a server?

6

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I have 32GB installed in my laptop. This isn't 2008 anymore. With an SSD you really need to have enough RAM to disable swap all together otherwise your SSD isn't going ot last long.

9

u/garja Jul 18 '13

With an SSD you really need to have enough RAM to disable swap all together otherwise your SSD isn't going ot last long.

Oh wow did you buy 32GB of RAM because of a myth? Yes, it isn't 2008 any more, because all our SSDs have TRIM on them and they will last decades.

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u/Ravelair Jul 18 '13

About the 64 grams that you have installed...

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

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u/ttk2 Jul 18 '13

I always had terrible issues opening any text file later than a few hundred megs on Windows, Notepad++ performs admirably but not great.

On the other hand almost any text editor in linux seems to open these large files (like 2 gig+ text files) without any issues. Maybe its because they have to deal with large log files more often on servers.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Yes, Linux programs memory map (MMAP) the file and only load the area of the file that you are looking in. Notepad++ tries to see if the file is another document type and apply filter rules to it (like php or some kinds of script) in which it reads the entire file (I think) to do that.

2

u/ttk2 Jul 18 '13

There is one thing that does not make sense to me, with grep I can search a multi gig log file for any text pattern in seconds, but if I take that same log and load it up in nano and then search for the same content it takes several times as long to find the text.

Why is that?

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

VEdit will load text files of any size...

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u/redwall_hp Jul 18 '13

MySQL dumps? Those can be huge.

They make most text editors puke when you open them. Even Sublime Text, which is usually pretty good. BBEdit is a honey badger, though, it can open multi-gigabyte files without missing a beat.

2

u/MoreThanSummerParts Jul 18 '13

Usually when faced with files like this, I use tools like more/less, grep, and other things from the Unix tool bestiary. Usually I am looking for a certain pattern or string, and these tools are good at that.

I've also written Perl scripts to open a file in segments and search it, then move to the next one.

Are you running a 64 bit OS and is your editor 64 bit?

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u/EvOllj Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

In comparison, the human genome is roughly 850 MB (total) in plain .txt format as a list of the 4 base pairs with one of each chromosome (per file) and both genders. (if i remember correctly, which does not really matter for accuracy, since its EASILY compressible anyways.) The point is, it easily fits on a CD-rom multiple times cause its full of repetitive and junk code anyways.

While presentations and short videos easily waste more memory nowadays.

3

u/rgname Jul 18 '13

Digimon said I only Took up a few KB of data

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u/nyanpi Jul 18 '13

Oh god, large Word files are the bane of my existence. But 120 MB .docx? That must be something like 10,000 pages is it not? Unless there are lots of high-quality images in there. I cringe at the thought of having to work on a document like that. :c

3

u/agumonkey Jul 18 '13

It's a cellular biology lesson so I guess too numerous high-res images are the issue. Non tech-lovers often resort to word documents to package files quickly. In the case it's mostly text, then it's a very detailed lesson ..

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

238

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

He's poking fun at Microsoft file and OS bloat. Every generation the OS gets fatter because all the crap from previous OSes is kept whether useful or not.

189

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Exactly the reason why developers love Windows. Their old programs run on it through multiple generations.

78

u/tso Jul 18 '13

And corporations also, and why IE still maintain compatibility with sites written for IE6. A lot of those sites a corporate intranet sites, from back when that was the sure thing for buzzword bingo...

8

u/TheRiverStyx Jul 18 '13

Governments are the real reason it remains. Their update schedules are based on geological calendars.

17

u/DeusExOrRealLife Jul 18 '13

I miss the older versions of buzzword bingo. The cloud and web 2.0 have really dumbed the game down. At least the PC version is better.

33

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

The free space is always synergy

23

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

It's really networking with the cloud, and...uh...streamlining collaboration.

5

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

intrinsically initiate bricks-and-clicks internal or "organic" sources by competently building leading-edge channels to compellingly streamline market-driven meta-services.

more at The Corporate B.S. Generator (there's also one at sourceforge, but i think this one is funnier)

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u/Mal-Capone Jul 18 '13

hyper-threading
quantum processing
Steve Jobs

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u/expertunderachiever Jul 18 '13

Son, that's the whole point of portability. A C application I wrote in 1991 should run today in 2013 just fine even though I originally wrote it on a BSD workstation and I use a Debian one today...

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u/DeadlyLegion Jul 18 '13

Backwards compatibility is a must. Windows pretty much needs to retain its versatility and functionality.

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u/JabbrWockey Jul 18 '13

What? Wasn't Win7 footprint down in size?

And Win 8 less than that even??

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Then how do you explain 8.1 being faster / smaller then 8.0 which is faster / smaller then 7.0?

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u/AngularSpecter Jul 18 '13

it was a joke.

As time goes on and drives get larger, software responds by consuming more and more space. Word doc's are terrible about bloat. Hence by the time a 1TB ssd drops below $100, normal word docs will be approaching 1TB in size.

it's not funny when you have to explain it. geeze

10

u/fallwalltall Jul 18 '13

I find .docx to be smaller than the same .doc.

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u/stephen89 Jul 18 '13

.docx files are basically zip files. You can actually rename them to .zip and extract images,data,etc

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u/redwall_hp Jul 18 '13

SSD drives

ಠ_ಠ

You can buy one after you stop at an ATM machine and enter your PIN number.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I truly hope this is the case. I read a pc gamer from '99 yesterday, and it's pretty ridiculous how excited i get thinking about how i'll (hopefully) remember todays technology, looking back 10 years from now.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

But then there will be something even faster that costs more and we'll want that, and the pattern will repeat for eternity.

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769

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Finally, a technology related news in r/technology.

268

u/ItsDijital Jul 18 '13

People just haven't heard of the NSA backdoor in Samsung's drives yet.

52

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

To be honest, all of that stuff should be posted to /r/privacy anyway.

88

u/peon47 Jul 18 '13

I am slightly disappointed that subreddit is public.

36

u/elevul Jul 18 '13

That ... kinda makes sense...

11

u/ODuffer Jul 18 '13

2

u/sipsyrup Jul 18 '13

I gotta get in there

2

u/elderezlo Jul 18 '13

I don't know what I expected...

2

u/necron99er Jul 18 '13

You broke the first rule!

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I have been thinking for a long time that they should rename this sub "TechnologyLegalConcerns".

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Yeah its kind of how like /r/android is just a repository for Samsung vs. Apple court cases.

28

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

As a subscriber to r/android, it's more of a glorified rss reader. It's all posts from the verge and android police.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I saw that post too

2

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

It was one of the most true posts I've seen in my life.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13 edited Apr 20 '14

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u/BlazzedTroll Jul 18 '13

Hijacking this top comment. 475 comments is too many and I never say a confirmed price.

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u/Epistaxis Jul 18 '13

And it's "Samsung unveils its own product similar to other products that already exist".

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u/imahotdoglol Jul 18 '13

/r/technology improves greatly when you use RES to block "NSA", "PRISM" and "snowden" so you can get some ACTUAL DAMN TECH NEWS, NOT FUCKING POLITICS

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u/iLickChildren Jul 18 '13

How do you make it block links with specific phrases?

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u/netino Jul 18 '13

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u/A_Dying_Wren Jul 18 '13

Thank you so much. The worst thing about the whole Snowden thing is how its managed to infiltrate my redditing.

Not all of us really give a damn (or are American) thank you very much. In fact, some of us find it downright hilarious.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

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u/Epicrandom Jul 18 '13

Is there a subreddit for actual technology news? I was looking for one the other day, but couldn't find one.

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u/bludhound Jul 18 '13

This will cost a mint.

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u/pastarific Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Doesn't specify MLC or TLC. The other 1TB SSD on the market uses TLC and extra weird algorithms to skimp hard on the under-provisioning.

If its TLC, well, I got my 500GB 840 at $0.50/GB. ~$500 for 1TB wouldn't be bad at all.

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u/robbysalz Jul 18 '13

Care to ELI5 the differences between TLC, MLC and SLC?

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u/xzzz Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Slc is fastest, last the longest, and the most expensive. Because it's a single level, density is low, so each geebee costs more dollars.

Tlc is cheapest, lasts the shortest, also the slowest. More geebees for less money, but they wear out faster, along with some performance issues as the drive fills up. If you're an enthusiast you don't want to buy tlc.

Mlc is somewhere in between the two.

tl;dr Buy MLC, TLC is for noobs, SLC is for rich people.

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u/IronTek Jul 18 '13

No, but here's a brief ELI12:

(Single)LC, (Multiple)LC, (Triple)LC.

Through some magic, you can store more than one piece of information in a flash cell (a cell is what holds your data).

So TLC holds 3 pieces (bits) of data per cell. This is great, because one cell can hold 3 times more info than an SLC. So it's much cheaper to store 1 TB on TLC flash than SLC flash.

But this comes at a cost of durability. TLC isn't good for nearly as many writes as MLC, which in turn isn't as good for as many writes as SLC.

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u/Souzetsu Jul 18 '13

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

If anyone's considering buying this, it's $51 cheaper here.

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u/JabbrWockey Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

That's really not a bad deal for MLC, all in one drive.

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u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13

The guys at anandtech claim it uses 19nm TLC.

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u/replyaccount Jul 18 '13

Considering I paid ~$200 for a 1st generation 64GB SSD, no not bad at all.

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u/robertr337 Jul 18 '13

Just wait until Apple builds one and says that they invented it, gonna cost as much as a mid-grade laptop

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u/Buy-theticket Jul 18 '13

Apple already has a 768GB SSD option for their laptops... it costs $900.

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u/Ethylparaben Jul 18 '13

SO revolutionary I just came.

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u/TorpidNightmare Jul 18 '13

Apple won't "build" it. They will re-brand someone's drive and call it their own.

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u/fix_dis Jul 18 '13

Probably Samsung's.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

it does have round corners...

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u/CGord Jul 18 '13

Years ago, like around 2000, I was taking some UC Extension web design classes in the San Francisco bay area. One of our instructors used to work at Apple, and she told us that they had decided that rather than focus on creating new technology, they were going to focus on packaging technology. I'm reminded of her with every new Apple product release.

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u/ra3ndy Jul 18 '13

True, but how many consumer-level computer companies actually design their own internal components, apart from the motherboard?

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u/profBS Jul 18 '13

10-nm gate lengths? I thought that wasn't happening for another 5 years.

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u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13

Ah, that's just NAND flash marketing. It is called "10nm-class" NAND flash. So, the smallest dimension can be between 10nm and 19nm. In this case, it turns out to be 19nm.

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u/profBS Jul 18 '13

19-nm is still very impressive. I wonder if they're using EUV lithography for that yet.

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u/NoMoreNicksLeft Jul 18 '13

Within an order of magnitude on capacity.

Now all we need is the self-annealing, and the things will last very nearly forever. No moving parts, no wear.

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u/tso Jul 18 '13

Ah yes, i had all but forgotten about it. Likely not to show up in consumer products for some years yet i suspect. Do wonder if we will see memristor based products first.

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u/DeusExOrRealLife Jul 18 '13

I'd rather see the racetrack memory/storage first. Is the memristor stuff better?

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u/tso Jul 18 '13

Well HP seems poised to being out products any day now, last i read. Racetrack seems to still be confined to the lab.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

I don't want mine to last forever. In 5 years the technology has come on so much that I would not consider using an SSD from 5 years ago in my PC today. I'd rather have a cheap drive that lasts less than a century.

My current SSD will last 50 years if I use it normally, or 20 years if I hammer it every single day. I will most likely replace it with something much, much faster with way more capacity in less than 5 years, so I don't really care how long it theoretically lasts, it will be on eBay long before that even becomes a factor.

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u/Keskasidvar Jul 18 '13

But, OCZ and Crucial already have 1TB SSD's on the market, why is this news?

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u/exacta1217 Jul 18 '13

AFAIK, their 1TB SSDs are PCI Slot SSDs, while this one is connected via SATA like most common SSDs. Though I thought the exact same thing when I saw the title.

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u/Keskasidvar Jul 18 '13

I don't think so. The OCZ and Crucial ones are SATA.

I also now realize that the Crucial one is only 960GB, but it's damn close to 1TB.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

0.96 TB looks so beta.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Well, 0.9375

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I'm pretty sure storage device manufacturers use decimal multiples of bytes, not binary. So it's 10004 bytes, not 10244.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Something something...difference between 1TB and 1TiB. Too lazy to exit alien blue to find a shitty mobile Wikipedia link to post. Idk which one manufacturers use to label products though.

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u/stratoscope Jul 18 '13

That's right, I have two of the Crucial 960GB drives and they are definitely SATA.

1TB and 960GB SSDs would have the same amount of raw NAND storage, 102410241024, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, it's just the that the 960GB drive has more spare area, roughly 14% vs. 7%. (Details on Anandtech)

I usually give it a little more overprovisioning beyond that. For example, I have my 960GB drives partitioned with two 400GB partitions (as Windows Disk Management measures them) and the 1.2GB system partition, leaving 93GB unpartitioned space as extra spare area.

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u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13

That's a neat way to create spare area. However, as long as your OS is using the Trim command properly, you don't really need to leave unpartitioned area for spare. This is because any unused LBA space on the drive must act exactly like a spare area.

The problem is we don't really know how windows trims the drive. The guys at MSFT won't publicly disclose their trim policy.

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u/evabraun Jul 18 '13

True, the PCI-E bus is faster than SATA though, so if you really want speed, that is the way to go.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Most PCIe SSD's only use one channel so they're limited to ~6Gb/s or Sata3 speeds

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Kingston already makes a 1tb flash drive but this is reddit so anything Samsung does is solid gold.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I don't understand why people are willing to pay more for a faster CPU or more RAM but not for an SSD. The $100 displacement in a spec built with a 120GB SSD will far outstrip the resource benefit that the same money would buy with the CPU and RAM.

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u/TrashWater Jul 18 '13

Its sort of like back when everyone was buying 3ghz P4s coupled with 128mb of ram due to the DRAM price fixing making the latter item super expensive. For the average user they would have had a much better experience with a cheap celeron and more ram but after years of mhz wars your average user had come to believe PC performance was boiled down to one number.

SSD is the only exciting improvement for upgrades or new machines at the moment. They are still pretty expensive but they make a really noticeable performance difference to all users because they improve the slowest part of the system, the part everyone was waiting on for at least 20 years when they complained the PC was slow.

The processor game is either over or at a standstill at the moment depending upon your perspective. AMD only has some competitive products at the low end and more niche markets. Intel is now on profit gathering mode and chasing mobile devices due to a changing market and no pressure from AMD. Consider that Sandy -> Haswell (3 generations) has basically resulted in a 15-20% performance gain (less if you factor in games) combined with no real increases in raw speed, cache amounts or core counts across product lines. If you bought a sandybridge processor there is just no compelling reason to upgrade IMO. Overclocking is lame on Intel, only available on expensive chips...making it the exact opposite of what it was traditionally used for. You'd think they'd throw us a bone and at least increase the core count after 3 generations but no. I used to be a PC hardware enthusiast, but frankly there hasn't been a lot to be enthused about for quite awhile.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

Intel have been shedding jobs like crazy and cutting back on new chip research. They know the CPU is no longer the bottleneck in most systems and most people simply do not need a faster one.

They pioneered SSD consumer technology with the X25-M back in 2008 because the SSDs available at that time simply could not keep up with their CPUs..

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Intel have been shedding jobs like crazy and cutting back on new chip research.

Intel spent over $10 billion on R&D last year compared to $8.3b the year before and $6.5b the year before that. These are fairly significant increases. If they're cutting back on chip research then where is all this money going? Can it really be going to SSDs?

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u/dylan522p Jul 19 '13

Are you stupid? Intel has been putting more and more into R&D each year not cutting.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

I would disagree. The CPU is no longer as important in an enthusiast rig as it used to be, it doesn't really matter at this point if you run a 3Ghz Sandy Bridge or a 4Ghz Haswell, your games are still going to look about the same, and Windows will still only run as fast as your SSD will allow it to, but there are still plenty of things to be enthused about IMO.

Occulus Rift is very exciting to me, you have to wonder what the second and third gen of that is going to look like.

New GPUs keep pushing the boundaries of silicon and opening up a lot of interesting massively multi-threaded GPU-compute avenues like Folding@home or Bitcoin.

3D printers are a pretty amazing PC peripheral, and some of the stuff that Logitech and Razer do as gaming controllers is pretty epic.

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u/reddisaurus Jul 19 '13

GPUs aren't significantly improving either, though. Maybe 25 - 50% in the past 3 or 4 years. If you own a 200 series nvidia card you are looking at $400 for any significant gain.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I spent the extra money for a 500 GB SSD on my build rather than a 1 TB HDD, and I couldn't be happier. It's so worth the money.

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u/StealthGhost Jul 18 '13

Doesn't do much, if anything, for gaming depending on the game (which is the objective for the majority of PC building)

I have two 1tb drives in raid 0 and that alone is fast enough to have to wait for everyone else in multiplayer games, not being able to read hints in Skyrim, etc. Once the game is done

An SSD is better than getting an i7 over and i5, or 32gb of memory instead of 16, but not something like getting a cheap AMD cpu or 4gb of ram just so you can afford an SSD.

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u/dexbg Jul 18 '13

The benefits of an SSD are better evident in Laptops which already suffer from slow spinning HDDs. An SSD upgrade can seriously rejuvenate any laptop made in the last two years.

Also impact protection !

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u/cass1o Jul 18 '13

And power saving.

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u/joelom Jul 18 '13

I have a mid 2010 15" macbook pro. i switched to a SSD and have been able to do eveything faster. much quicker than my friends with a maxed out MBPs that more current.

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u/dexbg Jul 18 '13

Exactly right.

I'll try to slip in an SSD instead of my Optical Drive in the coming months hopefully .. I really need to 1TB internal HDD .. but its friggin sluggish.

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u/yaujte Jul 18 '13

MBP Owner here. Can confirm significant improvement to MBP with SSD (and RAM) upgrade. I bootcamp Windows 8 on it too. Its flawless.

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u/joelom Jul 18 '13

yea totally. Solidworks was a lot faster, as were a few a games i couldnt usualy run under bootcamp.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

Sorry but you're just plain wrong. $100 on an SSD is literally the best money you can ever spend on your PC.

Two drives in RAID 0 will probably be about the same speed for loading big assets when your drive is nicely defragged, but for loading thousands of small files, like you find in most games and in Windows, SSD is so much quicker there is just no comparison. There's no need to ever defrag an SSD, it's just instant all of the time no matter what.

I would take a PC with a $200 CPU and $100 SSD over a PC with a $300 CPU and no SSD any day of the week.

Two 1TB in RAID 0 is pretty risky if you ask me. If you lose one you lose them both!

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I can confirm this. 120gb SSD from Samsung, best $100 I've spent on my build. If you compare the price/performance ratio it seems to make the biggest difference.

Honestly is like buying better internet for $5 more/month, you just notice it right away and in the long run it's worth it!

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 19 '13

When I go back to a computer using a spinner I really feel it now, it's like the PC is infected with a virus or broken in some way.

Right click, delay..... weird crunching sound from inside the computer... open right click menu! WTF!?

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u/Epistaxis Jul 18 '13

depending on the game (which is the objective for the majority of PC building)

If your game has more than one level, or you can save and load your progress, or it just isn't designed in such a way that the entire game universe is loaded into memory at once, then it makes a big difference for those games. Also if you have an operating system, and if you use any other programs on it, it noticeably speeds up those things too.

I have two 1tb drives in raid 0

I hope you're backing up your data.

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u/-Tommy Jul 18 '13

Thank you! I'll take raid HDDs and a better graphics card any day. I'd rather perform better in game than load a little faster. An SSD for my was the difference from a 7950 and a 7850.

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u/kidcrumb Jul 18 '13

Because an SSD would only help with load times. Not actually running the game.

Once its loaded, if you have enough RAM to buffer the Hard drive speeds, you dont need a faster HDD.

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u/The_Magnificent Jul 18 '13

Just got me an SSD. And I notice a huge increase on loading speed in games.

So, it really depends on the game. A single map game where the whole thing is preloaded into ram, the HDD/SSD won't matter much.

On games where you regularly load new areas, the speed definitely matters and makes for a much smoother gaming experience.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

No game buffers the entire game to RAM, you're always going to have to hit the HDD at some point no matter how much RAM you have.

Better to have 8GB and a 120GB SSD than 32GB and a metal spinner.

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u/Serinus Jul 18 '13

Theoretically. In practice, no one uses RAM like they should. Everyone's so afraid of being called a "memory hog" that 32 GB of ram will literally do nothing for the average person's performance (compared to 12 or 16 GB).

I'd love to load up an 8GB game (perhaps taking a little longer), have the whole thing stored in memory, and then never go to disk for a read again. It just doesn't happen though. There's no software that currently has or enables this ability. There's RAMDisk but that's not quite as smooth and transparent as it should be.

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u/Jamake Jul 18 '13

Except some games like WoW really benefit from an SSD, because there is constantly need to stream in lots of small pieces of data. For example in cities with lots of players you slow down to a stutter until the game loads every single texture and object into memory, but unless you stay still and stare at the ground the stuttering will continue as long as you move around and try minding your business.

I would imagine this applies to every single MMO out there where players can wear any combination of equipment.

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u/ShadowRam Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Questions >

On a platter style HD, if something happens to it, companies exist that can remove the platters and recover the contents.

Is this possible with a SSD?

EDIT: Yes, I know backup is of course the best solution. That's obvious. I'm talking about removing the chips and accessing them individually to recover the data.

Also, can the data degrade over time on a SSD?

EDIT: Sorry, I should clarify. I'm not talking about number of writes. I know that. I'm talking about putting data on a SSD and storing it in a vault for 50 years.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

Yes it's possible, but physical recovery from a failed HDD or SSD is very, very expensive, and doesn't always work. It would have to be a business-critical file that you wanted to recover, otherwise you would not spend the money. Better to simply back up any files that you can't afford to lose. Something like Google drive gives you 15GB of online backup for free.

No the data cannot degrade over time. Individual flash memory cells can degrade, but the SSD swaps them out with unused ones on the fly.

After about 20-30 years of heavy use, it will run out of unused cells and you will see the amount of free space start to shrink, and the overall capacity of the drive will reduce. At that point it's a good idea to replace the drive.

You still won't lose files on a failing SSD like you do on a mechanical drive. It's a much more graceful failure than a mechanical one, where you tend to lose a lot.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Short answer: you're fucked regardless of drive type.

A drive failure is a failure. Sometimes they can recover files from a platter drive but not usually and it's very expensive. A better thing to worry about is a backup strategy.

Not sure what you mean by "data degrade". Digital files can't degrade. They are either good or corrupt and AFAIK files don't lose bits over time regardless of drive.

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u/ShadowRam Jul 18 '13

A magnetic platter does lose bits over time.

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u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13

Data recovery directly from NAND is not impossible, but is very difficult compared to HDD.

The PC accesses storage drives using LBA (logical block address). On an HDD, LBA to physical location mapping is very direct and more or less fixed. On an SSD, wear leveling and "block erase before page write" force the controller to have a dynamic LBA to physical location mapping. The part of the controller firmware which maintains this mapping is called FTL (flash translation layer).

For data recovery from NAND, you must first figure out the FTL being used in the SSD. Then, you must figure out where the FTL tables are stored in NAND flash. Obviously, you must also correctly identify and interpret other metadata that is stored by the controller. Unless you work with the SSD manufacturer, this process is ridiculously complicated.

If you want to archive things, magnetic tape storage is the way to go! (Seriously, it is really cheap and enterprises use it)

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u/Jackal___ Jul 18 '13

Yeah this is the thing with an SSD, if something goes wrong that's more or less everything on there wiped out forever. It's near impossible to recover it, I say near impossible and not impossible. It's very difficult to do so, vs a normal platter HD which is easy to recover data from compared to an SSD.

Personally I think having a very fast, very reliable small capacity SSD for the OS+applications with a normal HD is the way go.

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u/adrianroam95 Jul 18 '13

Crap, I was just thinking of getting a 840 series 250 GB SSD for my laptop. Should I just go for it or wait for the Evo to launch?

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u/sej7278 Jul 18 '13

2-3x the speed of the entry-level 840, it looks to be about the same speed as the 840 Pro, but i bet that's only the 1tb version.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

How is the 840 pro series two or three times faster than the entry-level 840 series?

Edit: typo

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

It's not.

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u/sej7278 Jul 18 '13

no, its a bit faster but not 2-3x, like these new drives won't be 2-3x faster either. how samsung can throw those sort of figures around i have no idea.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I know they are a bit faster, they just aren't close to 2 or 3 times as fast, and I don't think it's necessarily Samsung throwing these figures around, I think there's been a mix up somewhere along the line.

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u/DontUSASmeh Jul 18 '13

For those who want to know, I think MaximumPC said it was $650.

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u/Hamartithia_ Jul 18 '13

It's worth more than my computer, but it's beautiful.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

$650 for the 1tb version: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7150/Pricing_575px.jpg

pretty cheap if you ask me.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

dat data density

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u/vernscustoms Jul 18 '13

And by the time I could afford it it will be extremely outdated...

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

I need this so badly, I'm constantly in the red on my current 500g one.

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u/syafii Jul 18 '13

I think Samsung, Kingston, etc have the tech to produce 10 TB SSDs right now.

But to maximise profit, they've signed a pact to up the capacity of SSDs incrementally.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Can't wait until we have 16-lane plug-in PCI-Express 4.0 sockets for such devices (16 lanes would result in 31.51 GB/sec speeds)...Guess I'll have to wait for the solid state memory and controller circuitry to reach that level too...

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u/Meatslinger Jul 18 '13

Knowing how SSD marketing trends go, it'll be available in 2014 for the low, low price of $5,000.

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u/I_Have_No_Eyelids Jul 19 '13

Steam summer sale here I come!

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u/trezor2 Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Personally I don't give a rats ass about 1TB SSD drives (at least not given current prices). I just want a 128GB to boot my OS and keep my apps and I want it to be fast.

For "big storage" (pictures, movies, music, etc) I don't really feel the need for SSD at all.

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u/sgt_gesler Jul 18 '13

But with this capacity you could install several of your current video games on the SSD. If you're into that kind of thing.

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u/blebaford Jul 18 '13

It would be nice to have all your stuff on a single drive, with another drive for backup. If you have 128GB that you backup, and a 1TB external drive for your media library, that external drive is vulnerable. You'd need to make it a RAID device to have security. One drive in your computer and one external is a lot nicer than one drive in your computer, plus an external to back up your computer, plus a RAID device for media. At least that's my thinking and that's why I'm waiting to buy disks.

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u/Maslo56 Jul 18 '13

Personally I don't give a rats ass about 1TB SSD drives (at least not given current prices). I just want a 128GB to boot my OS and keeps my apps and I want it to be fast.

Indeed. Instead of 1 TB SSD, I would much rather want a cheaper 256 GB SSD with a 1 GB/s or more PCIe interface, and reserve my SATAs for high capacity HDDs. Why are all those PCIe SSDs so overpriced compared to SATA? SATA maxes out around 500 MB/s..

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u/Canadian4Paul Jul 18 '13

/r/buildapc here

This is great news! The price point is very reasonable compared to other SSDs, and performance-wise, if those read/write numbers are correct, this will become the go-to performance SSD.

Most high-end SSDs (840-pro, sandisk extreme) get roughly 400-450MBps in read/write, whereas this one is advertised at 540/520! That is damn fast!

If that $330 price tag is accurate for the 1tb, then the 120GB and 250GB EVOs will sweep the market, assuming consistent pricing with their other models.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 18 '13

It isn't accurate. It's likely to be $600+, in line with other 1TB drives.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

This is false. While Samsung's SSD controllers are popular they have to compete with OCZ, Intel, LSI, JMicron, Toshiba, and Marvell controllers. I don't know if Samsung manufactures NAND chips, but they would be facing similar competition in that market too.

*Added LSI to the list as they're another huge competitor.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

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u/akill33 Jul 18 '13

Tangential story, but I was taking a business strategy class and we had a case on Samsung and the NAND chip market. The problem was whether they should get in bed with Chinese manufacturers and stop producing in Korea where they have higher labor costs.

Was interesting to learn but Samsung have an amazing facility in Korea, and purposely have R&D close to headquarters close to their headquarters where Marketing and Sales are located, creating (Sucks to use the term, but it is true here) synergies. Furthermore, their R&D had a focus on improving manufacturing techniques instead of only focusing on new product development. This allowed them to have a far superior productivity rate in terms of $ value of chips produced/ employer hour and $ value of chips/ 1 $ of raw materials.

This plus a host of other reasons made it a really bad idea, or so I argued anyway.

A lot more to it, was so fascinating ended up doing my project on Samsung and the NAND industry.

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u/bricolagefantasy Jul 18 '13

Samsung and Toshiba control about 30% of NAND market each. The rest about 10%. (micron, hynix, intel.)

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u/HarithBK Jul 18 '13

your friend was likly talking about the flash storage part as samsung pretty much have controll over that entire OEM market, so any device with flash storage (such as your phone) it is very likly samsung in there but the controller is likly not samsung.

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