Samsung SSD 840 EVO Review: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB & 1TB Models Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2013 1:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Samsung
- TLC
- Samsung SSD 840
Endurance
Samsung isn't quoting any specific TB written values for how long it expects the EVO to last, although the drive comes with a 3 year warranty. Samsung doesn't explicitly expose total NAND writes in its SMART details but we do get a wear level indicator (SMART attribute 177). The wear level indicator starts at 100 and decreases linearly down to 1 from what I can tell. At 1 the drive will have exceeded all of its rated p/e cycles, but in reality the drive's total endurance can significantly exceed that value.
Kristian calculated around 1000 p/e cycles using the wear level indicator on his 840 sample last year or roughly 242TB of writes, but we've seen reports of much more than that (e.g. this XtremeSystems user who saw around 432TB of writes to a 120GB SSD 840 before it died). I used Kristian's method of mapping sequential writes to the wear level indicator to determine the rated number of p/e cycles on my 120GB EVO sample:
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO Endurance Estimation | |||||||
| Samsung SSD EVO 120GB | |||||||
| Total Sequential Writes | 4338.98 GiB | ||||||
| Wear Level Counter Decrease | -3 (raw value = 35) | ||||||
| Estimated Total Writes | 144632.81 GiB | ||||||
| Estimated Rated P/E Cycles | 1129 cycles | ||||||
Using the 1129 cycle estimate (which is an improvement compared to last year's 840 sample), I put together the table below to put any fears of endurance to rest. I even upped the total NAND writes per day to 50 GiB just to be a bit more aggressive than the typically quoted 10 - 30 GiB for consumer workloads:
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO TurboWrite Buffer Size vs. Capacity | |||||||
| 120GB | 250GB | 500GB | 750GB | 1TB | |||
| NAND Capacity | 128 GiB | 256 GiB | 512 GiB | 768 GiB | 1024 GiB | ||
| NAND Writes per Day | 50 GiB | 50 GiB | 50 GiB | 50 GiB | 50 GiB | ||
| Days per P/E Cycle | 2.56 | 5.12 | 10.24 | 15.36 | 20.48 | ||
| Estimated P/E Cycles | 1129 | 1129 | 1129 | 1129 | 1129 | ||
| Estimated Lifespan in Days | 2890 | 5780 | 11560 | 17341 | 23121 | ||
| Estimated Lifespan in Years | 7.91 | 15.83 | 31.67 | 47.51 | 63.34 | ||
| Estimated Lifespan @ 100 GiB of Writes per Day | 3.95 | 7.91 | 15.83 | 23.75 | 31.67 | ||
Endurance scales linearly with NAND capacity, and the worst case scenario at 50 GiB of writes per day is just under 8 years of constant write endurance. Keep in mind that this is assuming a write amplification of 1, if you're doing 50 GiB of 4KB random writes you'll blow through this a lot sooner. For a client system however you're probably looking at something much lower than 50 GiB per day of total writes to NAND, random IO included.
I also threw in a line of lifespan estimates at 100 GiB of writes per day. It's only in this configuration that we see the 120GB drive drop below 4 years of endurance, again based on a conservative p/e estimate. Even with 100 GiB of NAND writes per day, once you get beyond the 250GB EVO we're back into absolutely ridiculous endurance estimates.
Keep in mind that all of this is based on 1129 p/e cycles, which is likely less than half of what the practical p/e cycle limit on Samsung's 19nm TLC NAND. To go ahead and double those numbers and then you're probably looking at reality. Endurance isn't a concern for client systems using the 840 EVO.
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eamon - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Unless you want to run some kind of continual I/O server, I suspect performance will be fast enough not to matter; I'd only look at pricing if I were you...Busverpasser - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
Hi there, great review, thanks a lot. Actually I do have a question... The article says "The performance story is really good (particularly with the larger capacities), performance consistency out of the box is ok (and gets better if you can leave more free space on the drive)..."Does leaving more free space mean that this space is supposed to be unpartitioned or just not filled with data? When I bought my Intel Postville SSD some time ago, I left some space unpartitioned but never really knew whether that was the right thing to do :D. Can someone give me a hint here?
xchaotic - Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - link
@Busverpasser just leave more space free, it doesn't have to be unpartitioned.Worst case if you need that extra space for a while, you'll get lower performance, but more storage whenever you need it.
speculatrix - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
the table titled "Samsung SSD 840 EVO TurboWrite Buffer Size vs. Capacity" should be titled "Capacity vs Usage vs Endurance"rdugar - Friday, August 23, 2013 - link
Am in the market for an SSD finally to replace an HDD on a Windows 7 laptop. Was almost set on the 128GB Samsung 840 Pro, but saw the comment on poor performance at almost full capacities.Price, reliability and endurance being the most important to me, which one should I go for?
128Gb Samsung 840 Pro? approx $119 after coupons, etc.
120 GB Samsung 840 EVO? probably $99 or so
256 GB Samsung 840 EVO? probably $165 or so
Other brand and model?
If I have to spend $120 odd, may as well spend another $50 and get double the capacity....
tfop - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
I have a question regarding to the NAND Comparison table.How do this Page and Block sizes affect the right Clustersize and Alignment of the Partition?
If i am getting this right, the SSD 840 EVO would need a 8 KiB Clustersize and a 2 MiB Alignment.
Gnomer87 - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
I have a couple of questions:First, how much data is typically written to the average consumer HDD on a daily basis these days? I am thinking it's nowhere close to 50GiB. I guess what I am really interested in knowing, is how much data the operating system(windows 7) writes to the drive for various maintenance uses(if there are any beside defragmenting). In my mind, simply booting up the computer shouldn't mean any writes to the drive at all. Ergo, given my typical use, a 120GB SSD of that caliber, should last a lifetime. Am I right in thinking this? I mean, reading doesn't affect the durability right?
Secondly: I've been considering getting an SSD for use as a OS drive for a long time, reason of course was to speed up boot time. However, I've long wondered WHY windows boots so slowly from HDDs in the first place. After all, the amount of data loaded during boot up isn't large. In my case the processes post-boot take up around 200 MBs, Assuming the actual amount of data loaded from the drive is about the same, it really shouldn't take that long. My HDD is capable of reading up to 120 MBs in optimal situations, so it's obvious the boot up process isn't optimal by a long shot.
But why this slow? It can take over a minute before she(my computer) is done loading and starting all processes. Last semester I took course in Operating system at the local university. I must confess I was a horrible student, I didn't show up much. But I do remember a few key elements, namely the scheduler and how this scheduler continually does context switches, letting each process use the CPU, and thus creating parallelism. Now what was really interesting was resource management. It's the scheduler that decides which process is currently running on the cpu, and the scheduler process is run in between each context switch, effectively letting each user process run and have access to resources, such as the hard drive. Now, what happens if all the processes want data from the drive at the same time? Would each process continually interrupt the other processes loading of data, and thus causing the HDD to seek constantly?
Could that explain why booting takes such idiotic amounts of time? An extremely inefficient resource management that basically ignores the inherent seek-time related weaknesses of an HDD? SSDs, as we know, barely have seek-time, and thus the performance loss from context switching should be negligible.
I know my cousins SSD powered computer boots near instantly, once it's done with the usual BIOS stuff, the OS is booted and ready for use in mere seconds. And yes, we are talking a completely cold boot here, no sleep or anything like that.
abhilashjain30 - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
I purchased Samsung 120GB EVO 3 days back from OnlySSD ( http://goo.gl/HqgjId )and Drive performance is too good compare to 120GB 840 Basic Series.abhilashjain30 - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Available at OnlySSD dot comabhilashjain30 - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
Samsung Evo Series now available online in India. You can check on OnlySSD dot com or PrimeABGB dot com