I have decided to buy a new SSD, because my 840 EVO is a pain in ... well. It has issues, and i dont know what to do about it. I think its related to the read bug Anandtech blogged about earlier. I tried updating firmware etc. yet it seems Samsung doesnt care, as usual. :(
Anyways. My question here is about the 850 Pro/EVO.
I want to buy a 500gb SSD, and i want it to last for some time. I know SSD's become obselete, but when this happends i will use this SSD for storage, so it will be used for some time.
However i do not know whether to choose the EVO or the PRO, because honestly they seem very very alike, in performance etc.
Id appreciate any thoughts, comments etc. about these 2 SSD's :)
Also. - Is there any problem with them? because Logan always seem to talk about Corsair, Kingston etc, never Samsung SSD's? or is it just because these are what he has atm. ? :)
EDIT: Also, what could the different NAND (MLC vs TLC) mean in the future?
Grab the 850 Evo. The 500GB model has a TBW of 150TB and a 5 year warranty. That means you can write at least 80GB of data every single day for next 5 years. Most SSDs will continue to work long past that, so unless you do a ton of work that requires an insane amount of writes (such as video editing) I wouldn't even consider the 850 Pro. By that time, something more awesome has surely arrived.
My Evo is around 2 months old so I can't really comment if there's anything wrong with them. I do know that they are crazy fast, with and without data that can be compressed, and have a very nice guaranteed endurance rating (hence the long warranty).
I have had 1 tv and 3 samsung phones with problems, and everytime samsung didnt give a .... so i really dont bother to contact them anymore :( I was lucky with the phones that the retailer exchanged it, but they also noted that Samsung did not wish to help.
Reformatting (unless it's a quick format) is a horrible thing to do to an ssd. I had a 250 gig 840 evo and it was functioning at about .2 mb/s transfer speed, tried the cleaning, and tried updating it (it was already up to date). So i took it out and ripped it apart for the lulz, damn tiny things in those little metal boxes lol.
Every time you write or read from an ssd, you are degrading it physically, so reformatting is like unnecessarily hurting every single nand gate in the poor thing.
The only reason my system drive is an 850 Pro is that the EVO hadn't come out yet when I bought it. The EVO is as fast except for large sequential writing operations(the bigger the drive the better), and they're priced very competitively to other modern drives at similar sizes today.
The problem your current 840 EVO experiences isn't related to the known firmware problem (that should also be largely fixed today) but more likely the individual drive itself or perhaps the controller on the motherboard.
Another 500GB'ish size drive I'd recommend out of personal experience and reviews is the Crucial MX100 512GB, but it's not as common out there after Crucial launched the MX200 and BX100 drives. The latter ones does not appear to perform better though at least from the first reviews unless they've fixed something in the MX200 firmware or so. I'm running games and stuff from a couple of MX100 drives and they're fast enough and has a good reputation. Warranty is not as long as the 850 series from Samsung, if that matters.
I have this "old" 840 non-EVO drive that is bitten by pretty much the same firmware problem but somewhat less effected. Samsung hasn't updated the firmware for that one but for what I've seen on this drive the performance problem doesn't show up until after a long time of having Nand cells lying inactive, so rewriting the data on the drive once or twice a year takes care of the problem. Nand memory write endurance today is pretty good so even if one were to do that once a week it wouldn't be a problem over the lifetime of a consumer drive.
Im pretty sure the latest firmware fixed all the 840 woes - I've got 3 840's kicking around in systems, all updated and run just fine (even the old file tead speeds). If you drive is still not right - RMA it, thats what warranty's are for.
If money is not a problem then grab a PRO otherwise the EVO's are just fine imho. Otherwise there are great drives from the likes of Crucial, Sandisk, Adata, Intel etc. Just avoid ones like the cheap Kingston's.