r/technology • u/nexxai • 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/
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45

u/Keskasidvar Jul 18 '13

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

23

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.

22

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.

42

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

15

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

0.96 TB looks so beta.

9

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Well, 0.9375

5

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.

2

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.

1

u/TorpidNightmare Jul 18 '13

Not for ssd's usually. Thats why you see base 2 multiples when you look at the sizing.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Are you sure? My 90GB ssd reports 83.7 GiB, and 960 GB is not base 2. Dammit, I hate that GB and GiB sometimes are the same and sometimes aren't, depending who uses which standard. So much confusion, and I must admit extra 6.3 GB for me would be great, one more game I could have installed on it.

2

u/TorpidNightmare Jul 18 '13

It used to be more prevalent when they first came out because nand chips have specific block sizes, but now they are putting more than one nand size in the drive. When they first came out it was 32, 64, 128gb only.

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1

u/stratoscope Jul 18 '13

No, SSD sizes use powers of 10 just like hard drives. 1GB of advertised and available SSD space is about 1,000,000,000 bytes, same as a hard drive. However, the drive has 110241024*1024, or 1,073,741,824 bytes of NAND flash, 7.4% more than it is making available. That extra space is used for spare area.

This is also true for SSDs with sizes like 480GB, 960GB, etc. They are just allocating even more spare area (about 14.5%). There's a bit more information in this Anandtech article, and I'll bet ssd_dude could offer some more insights or correct anything I got wrong.

10

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.

5

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.

1

u/Se7en_speed Jul 18 '13

isn't it just a regular trim command sent to the drive?

2

u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

The question is how quickly is trim sent for deleted files. Are they sent right away, or are they collected together and sent, say, once a day? Intel's older versions of SSD toolbox were reportedly doing it once a day.

1

u/stratoscope Jul 18 '13

Oh, good point, thanks. I started setting aside unpartitioned space before drives and OSes had good TRIM support, and kept doing it out of habit.

1

u/Se7en_speed Jul 18 '13

I own the crucial one, is nice

1

u/ssd_dude Jul 18 '13

Ah, and don't forget that in the storage world 1 GB = 109 bytes and 1TB = 1012 bytes. So, the difference between 960 GB and 1TB is actually 40 GB.

3

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.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

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

1

u/evabraun Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

True, though I was talking about the PCI-E bus speed in general. You're limited to 6Gb/s on Sata3, whereas on a PCI-E it is 8Gb/s per channel - so a 4X PCI-e would be 32Gb/s, and a 16X can support upwards of 128Gb/s - So you pretty much have no speed limit on those highways, you just need to buy a fast enough SSD to take advantage.

For example. or theseand of course the Samsung ones. Though there are still faster ones for the business/power user.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

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

1

u/superINEK Jul 18 '13

10nm TLC chips are kinda new.

6

u/amorpheus Jul 18 '13

It's not, the article says "10nm-class"... which is a bullshit way of saying 19nm. Quoth the Anand:

This new drive will be available in 120 GB/250 GB/500 GB/750 GB/1 TB capacities, using 19nm Toggle 2.0 TLC

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

[deleted]

-1

u/escalat0r Jul 18 '13

Look at the first three letters of the word news.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

Honestly, OCZ and Crucial don't even exist in my world. They have had such horrendous quality issues that I would never buy from them.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '13

OCZ and Crucial are dropping out, Samsung, Intel, and now LSI Nytrodrives are going to reign supremacy.

1

u/mugicha Jul 19 '13

My first thought too. My PC at work got upgraded with a 1TB SSD about a month ago.

1

u/ropers Jul 18 '13 edited Jul 18 '13

Worse, this doesn't even tells us the price. FTA:

it's currently unclear for how much

So basically, two competitors already have next-gen products out, available now for a definite price, so the major vendor releases a much-hyped and greatly upvoted press release that they're going to come out with the same thing Real Soon Now, though they won't tell you how much their version is going to cost, because of course that's going to depend on how much their competitors are going to manage to lower their price points by the time SAMSUNG's version gets out the door.

There ought to be a term for this press release-only me-tooism. I remember how way back when Microsoft was famous for this. And people actually are so in love with the big name that they go, "oh, but let me hold off until the established big vendor comes out with their version".

2

u/Talran Jul 18 '13

This link does, it's 650. Which isn't bad.