I’m looking to get an ssd game drive for my PC. I came across these ebay listings for Samsung PM863a SSDs. These are datacenter SSDs, so they have a High TBW rating (2700TBW for the 1.92TB model). These are most definitely out of their 3 year original warranty. Does anyone have experience buying SSDs?
These are old SATA drives. So they wont be any faster or slower than your standard consumer SATA SSDs.
Price is about half of what new datacenter SSDs cost per TB ($200/TB). 40TB writes is basically nothing for these kind of drives. But you get like 1.200TBW with good 2TB consumer drives nowadays, so the difference isn’t as extreme as it was like 3-4 years ago.
Depends on what you want. NVMe SSDs are much faster, but you probably need a U.2 adapter if you stick the datacenter SSDs.
I’m fine with SATA drives. I have an nvme for my boot drive. My motherboard only has one more m.2 slot, which is routed via the chipset. I’ll probably use that for something else in the future. This is just for storing games.
40 out of the 2k+ TBW rating does seem to suggest it’s been barely used. I was hoping to see if anyone here had first hand experience with such drives.
I’ve experienced 2nd hand Intel SSDs from data centres they are solid but not fast. Plenty of life in them. Unless they are cheaper than new SSDs they are not worth getting. The cheapest SSD SATA storage is at 2TB right now. The 4TB are a lot more expensive and the 1TB are a little more expensive. The 500GB are very poor value.
Not exactly experience, but i might be able to put it into more obvious terms: that’s 40TB out of 2PetaByte rated write endurance - that’s barely used, if you ask me (i’m a nobody, don’t ask me)
I’m running an Intel SSD DC P3700 400GB PCIe card as my ZFS R/W cache - bought it with over 4 years on the clock, probably out of warranty, but barely used - only ~7 TeraByte of its 7.3 PetaByte TBW endurance rating spent (currently, it’s at ~40TBW) …i’m not exactly sure which point i wanted to make - but if i’d make any point, it’d be that i trust Samsung as much as i trust the reliability of Intel
IMHO, if Samsung tells you n-hundred of TB endurance, that’s worth as much in Intel-TBWs - both brands have their reputation for a reason
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I barely know enough about accounting and biz admin, to know that technically fine devices are sold-off, because of upgrade-cycles, in order to compensate new spending.
Although out of warranty, you might get a really sweet deal on datacentre hardware.
Thought I’d give an update. I made 2 purchases, and both seem to have no/barely any use.
I got a PM863a 1.92TB SATA with <2TB written to it for $150 + tax. Power on hours were a few days. Link Seller
I got a PM983a 1.88TB M.2 22110 NVME with 0 writes to it for $130 + tax. Power on hours were a few hours. Link Seller
The 2nd SSD is kind of interesting as these seems to be underprovisioned (compared to the standard 1.92TB capacity) one for some datacenter markets (found this link on STH)
Edit: Added links and seller information
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