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by cabirum 4020 days ago
Strange, Samsung 840/850 evo/pro are considered [1][2] among the best consumer SSDs. The issues article mentions do not exist on Windows, the SSDs are very reliable there. I suspect it's not only Samsung fault. Are we sure Linux handling of TRIM operations is absolutely correct?

[1] http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb...

3 comments

The problem is that "absolutely correct" is a slippery concept. Even the most tightly written standard is likely to have some areas of ambiguity through which bugs can creep. If the way that a particular device deals with that ambiguity is known only to those under NDA, then you can have two drivers that are both "absolutely correct" per the standard but only one actually works in all the edge conditions.
Windows doesn't do queued TRIM (yet).
Personally, I find Samsung has a "it boots? Fine then ship," mentality to pretty much all things. Their buggy phones, buggy SSD's, buggy TV's, etc. I wouldn't recommend them, even though they do well on SSD speed tests (which are often gamed by on-board ram caching).
The 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB of writes before failing in Anandtech's tests over 18 months: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

Even if Samsung has some systemic problems, it's more subtle than just schlocky marketing, or targeted benchmarking.