back to article Samsung stuffs 2 TERABYTES into flash drive for ordinary folk

Samsung has brought out a pair of mighty 2TB solid-state drive (SSD) internal drives aimed at the consumer market. The South Korean electronics giant said its 850 SSD PRO and EVO hard drives pack 2TB of capacity in a 2.5in hard-drive enclosure. Each drive contains 128 32-layer 128Gbit Samsung 3D V-NAND chips as well as four …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    GIMMIE!

    I've been watching from a distance. Right now, 1TB (spinning rust) is holding my data but the drive has always been a little on the slow side.

    1TB drives aren't that compelling, at that size I'll just put up with the little bit of sluggishness. However, above 1TB, then things start to get interesting.

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: GIMMIE!

      Why not buy a smaller SSD for your OS and programs, and keep your data on the cheaper spinning rust?

      Things like pictures, music and videos don't need higher transfer speeds than a harddrive (except raw hi def video), so why waste money putting them on an SSD?

      1. James O'Shea

        Re: GIMMIE!

        "Why not buy a smaller SSD for your OS and programs, and keep your data on the cheaper spinning rust?"

        Because...

        1 my laptop doesn't have enough space for two internal drives and I'd really rather not haul around an external drive

        2 my Windows desktop already has all the internal drive bays filled up. I'd have to pull _two_ drives, replace one with a drive large enough to hold the data from the two drives, migrate the data, and then put in the SSD. Easier to leave well enough alone until the next time I build a new system.

        3 my Mac desktop (a Mac mini) has space for two internal drives but both are in use. Again, I'd have to migrate the data to another internal drive or to an external. Messing with the innards of a Mac mini is non-trivial, though better than it used to be. And a new Mac mini is not on, Apple has deleted the ability to have two internal drives for reasons which no doubt made sense to them.

        That said... I'm not buying one of these because of the price. It's more than I paid for for any of the computers I'd use it in. (Yes, it costs more than Apple kit, which pretty much says it all.)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: GIMMIE!

          phuzz writes:

          Why not buy a smaller SSD for your OS and programs, and keep your data on the cheaper spinning rust?

          James O'Shea writes:

          1 my laptop doesn't have enough space for two internal drives and I'd really rather not haul around an external drive

          James has nailed the problem. If you can figure out how to cram a second SSD into this machine, you'll be on the money.

          If it were my desktop, I'd invest in 7200RPM 3TB+ drives, in fact it wasn't that long ago that that I upped it to two 4TB drives.

          The desktop is fine, and most of the time it is in stand-by mode. I wake it up using Wake-On-LAN triggered by a dial script in UUCP: if I want to toss a file on there, I can either use grunt-uucp to send the file there, or I can use uux to ping the machine, and just wait a moment for the machine to wake up and access it via SSH.

          My laptop however, I do not have the same luxury. External drives are good, but they have their inconveniences. While I could build a cradle to attach the external drive and a USB 3 hub to the back of the screen, the 2TB SSD option is a better one.

          1. phuzz Silver badge

            Re: GIMMIE!

            If your laptop contains a DVD or CD drive that you can live without, you can buy caddies that convert the optical bay into a space for a 2.5" drive.

            Not always an option, but it can work well.

            1. Lee D Silver badge

              Re: GIMMIE!

              Those caddies (and more usually, the cables they are plugged into) generally only support SATA II at best. They aren't ideal by a long shot.

              However, some laptops do have dual-drives plus optical (like my Samsung), and I've just replaced one of the drives with the 1Tb version of this - it's flying.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: GIMMIE!

              Yep, I do use my DVD drive, oddly enough. Been using it for audio books lately, but also get the odd data CD or DVD that needs reading.

              About the only option I might have, may be via the ExpressCard slot but I'd have to research it. Quick search seems to suggest that adaptors exist for this, and that Windows 7 has problems booting such a set-up however Linux should be doable using it as cache for the spinning rust. Just a bit tricky setting up the initrd to make it bootable.

              However, I'm in no rush. I can either rush out, spend $500 on a 1TB mSATA disk, possibly as much as $50, and a good few hours of my time to make it work, or I can just sit tight a little while longer.

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    10yr Warranty?

    Given thant Samsung just announced yet another loss for thr 7th straight quarter, will they still be in this business(flogging whole drives rather than just the chips) in 10years?

    Will any bits of consumer kit even be able to take 2.5in drives in say 5 years?

    1. fandom

      Re: 10yr Warranty?

      They did? The register article only says that their profits are decreasing.

      But then making over six billions dollars a quartet doesn't seen too bad.

      Well, maybe it does to Apple.

      1. Adam 1

        Re: 10yr Warranty?

        I wish my company was that unsuccessful.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 10yr Warranty?

      Given thant Samsung just announced yet another loss for thr 7th straight quarter, will they still be in this business(flogging whole drives rather than just the chips) in 10years?

      Will any bits of consumer kit even be able to take 2.5in drives in say 5 years?

      A valid point, however a long warranty period suggests they are certain the drive won't fail in that time. If the SSDs were truly unreliable, their own warranty claim stats would soon tell them. The beancounters wouldn't allow a 10 year warranty to be placed on a drive if there was a high probability of it failing in that time as the financial impacts of having a large batch of drives fail would be ruinous to the company.

      Like all such kit, keep good backups and all will be fine.

  3. jonathanbuckle

    Enterprise

    You can actually get 3.84TB PM863 samsung drives (enterprise version of the evo) and have been able to get 1.92TB PM863 (enterprise version of the 850 pro) for a few months!

  4. Najt
    Trollface

    And our pure storage array has 2,75TB of raw capacity... :/

  5. Tromos

    Price

    It may be aimed at the consumer market but, at $999, it misses.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Price

      By a very wide margin.

      1. JEDIDIAH
        Linux

        Re: Price

        It was painful enough when I finally had to give up on cheap Seagates in favor of WD Red drives and that's nothing compared to one of these.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ZZZZZ old news

    SanDisk has 2TB and 4TB already, with 6TB and 8TB on the way.

  7. YARR
    WTF?

    "Each drive contains 128 32-layer 128Gbit Samsung 3D V-NAND chips"

    Surely not? It can't be possible to fit 128 chips inside a 2.5" drive. They must mean 4 chips each containing 32-layers (effectively 128 layers, each storing 16Gbytes/128Gbits).

    Either way, 128 layers of silicon must consume a large area of wafer. No wonder they're so expensive. I can't see there being much room for price reduction / economy of scale in future.

  8. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    150TB write life. What. How is that remotely adequate?

    I have all of the sads. Every single sad.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Because most people - like broadband uploads vs downloads - don't write a lot, only read.

      This is not a server tool. How much writing do your home PC's do? Basically what you've downloaded and created that day, and that's it.

      If you're assuming 10 year life, and downloading, say, 15TB a year, that's 15,000 GB or thereabouts, which is over 1000GB a month - I'll be more impressed with your Internet connection than where you're storing it all. I have a Steam account with 1000 games and it doesn't approach that kind of space. This is basically deleting and redownloading every game I own every single month.

      Or your creation ability if you're churning out 1000GB a month of user-created content. Maybe video, but then you'll probably be better off with a more professional setup than one SSD by the time you get to that level of content-creation.

      And, don't forget, reads are "free".

      This is perfectly adequate for a consumer drive. No, you wouldn't want it in a 24/7 RAID5 config on a server. But then, if you did that, I'd call you an idiot just for trying that in a limited write-life device. This is not a server drive. This is a consumer drive. And for that purpose it's absolutely fine and way out of most people's reach, even most IT professionals.

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        I just checked all 4 endpoints in my house. We have written an average of 2500GB per endpoint since the beginning of July. That's not through torrenting or video creation. It's just through regular use, updating playing some video games and so forth. (For the record, temporary/cached file storage for web usage seems to be really a lot heavier than you'd think, as does cache usage for video players when we're streaming videos from the media server.)

        We're writers. We don't exactly have demanding requirements for our endpoints. We're not "abnormal" in our usage.

        So your whole premise is kind of out the window.

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