Gadgetory

so this is something that's always bothered me it seems like everyone else gets high density high capacity storage whether it's USB thumb drives that have been available in capacities as big as you know 256 gigs fairly cheaply for years or even up to a terabyte if you want to spring from of those Kingston ones foams are all the way up to 128 gigs microSD cards I think are available in like 256 gig at this point em SATA SSDs I mean we're talking full-blown SSDs are available in up to one terabyte capacities so why is it that when it comes to two and a half inch SSDs for your full-size laptop or your desktop we've been stuck at the same damn 1 terabyte capacity for so long with Samsung only recently releasing a 2 terabyte SSD sold in today's video we're going to be introducing two things number one is the largest SSD that I have ever had my hands on this is a 3.8 4 terabyte SSD and number 2 is a new format inspired by this thing that we're calling holy Sh Tunnel Bear is the easy-to-use VPN service that lets you browse the Internet as though you're in one of 20 different countries check out the link in the video description to learn more and try it for free so I think the appropriate way to start something like this when you got like something really cool and interesting and different is with one of our classic unboxing so let's go ahead and rip this baby open and find out what exactly a 3.8 4 terabyte SSD looks like woah the answer is that aside from the horrendous box with the 3-year warranty policy thing in it clearly designed for people who don't care about the retail packaging exactly the same as any other SSD I mean okay sure you've got the 3.8 4 terabyte capacity written on there there's probably some other specs like there's your power consumption so it consumes about 4.1 watts of power when it's being written to it's rated at 540 megabytes per second read 480 megabytes per second right and can handle ninety nine thousand I ups when it comes to random 4k at a queue depth of 32 so that's pretty respectable but only about 18,000 die ops and again that's 4k random and a queue depth of 32 when it comes to writes meaning that this is definitely a reads optimize drive in terms of the form factor if you check it out it's got a standard SATA power standards SATA data yes my friends everything that's interesting about this drive pretty much is under the hood so what we open it up I don't know if I'll ever stop appreciating the irony of these kits being called iFixit when they let me use one because I never use them to fix anything and usually breaking stuff whatever warranties are for chumps anyway and if if I didn't open it up how would I show you where all the magic blue smoke gets gets held while the drive is operating alright so first thing you're going to notice a bunch of flash chips actually not that many in the context of how large the drive is each one of these is about 480 gigabytes of capacity wrap your freaking brain around that and the way they achieve that is in a couple of ways first of all they are TLC flash which means that they can store three bits per cell that gives better capacity and lower cost per capacity although you do trade off some right endurance as well as right performance and then the other one the big one is the fact that they are using Samsung's 3d v-nand with 32 layers a flash memory stacked instead of just relying on Moore's law to continue to spread out all of those cells so that is what has enabled them to deliver this puppy both at a reasonable cost and in a reasonable form factor but of course there's more technology on board as well so you're going to find a tantalum capacitor on here that's going to allow the cash to flush to the NAND chips in the event of a sudden power loss as well as well you won't be able to see it but inside Samsung's proprietary controller you'll find some ECC correction technology as well as we're leveling trim and all that good stuff that allows the drive to perform as well as it does and this is cool in spite of the fact that it uses TLC flash this drive is rated at a two million hour mean time between failure and rated at 5,600 terabytes of total data written and within its sort of useful lifespan so to put that in perspective that would be writing the entire capacity of this drive 3.8 four terabytes per day for four years every day before you would use up what Samsung rates it at but enough about that let's go ahead and plug it into a bench and well if nothing else find out if it still works basically what I'm doing right now is I'm demonstrating exactly how to not benchmark an SSD and I'm going to copy a file from my SSD on Tyrande so you can see it's actually not going that fast and the reason for that is that this SSD is not designed for large contiguous file transfers it is designed rather for something more like the application that we are going to be using it for which is multiple users hitting it for something like streaming video all at the same time so these SSDs are going to act as a read cache for our video editors to edit video files off of so they're going to be scrubbing back and forth through video files they're going to be asking it for this clip in the next clip and then you know moving through the timeline adding things removing things and that is the kind of workload that something like this is great for where we will be writing video clips to it that will actually be reading them back many times for every time that we write to them all right Linus so a video about a drive the cool things about which you can't really demonstrate thumbs actually hold on no there are some things I can demonstrate and one of them is the sheer data density of this so just for comparison this is Intel 750 series nvme SSD this is a 1.2 terabyte drive and unlike that drive what Samsung has managed to do here is within that 7 millimeter form factor so it'll fit in pretty much any laptop or certainly any desktop they have delivered 3.8 4 terabytes and that's pretty impressive but you know micro SD cards right like they're huge no no this is where it gets really cool so this is as good as it gets for a hard drive these days this is almost as good as it gets for even three-and-a-half inch hard drives now so to put it in perspective this is about half the capacity of this guy right here very cool but not actually the coolest thing about it the coolest thing about this puppy is the cost per gigabyte and you guys are like oh yeah I knew he was coming to this eventually how much does it cost so this guy right here is going to set you back about 2,200 u.s. dollars too much most of you are probably going to go excuse me you're going to tell me this is a value in terms of cost per gigabyte yeah actually because while I am NOT here to tell you guys that you should all run out and buy one of these today so you can keep all your steam games on one SSD yay because most games loading times are not even any faster on faster storage no no where the cost per gigabyte benefit comes in is in the sheer density of it like in a data center application let's say Netflix for example wants to roll out you know racks on racks on racks of new servers with you know all the latest hey say for example cool movies that you and all your friends want to watch well rather than just the cost of this guy to worry about is only about 55 cents per gig which is pretty good especially given like a few years ago we were paying over a dollar there's more to worry about than just this cost there's the cost of the drive cage it sits in the cost of the SATA controller that controls that cage the cost of the CPU that runs that system the cost of the actual real estate inside a data center that that server has to sit inside so if you can double the amount of storage that again someone like a video streaming service can have per drive sled you are going to have a whole lot of folks saying shut up and take my money and that is the most impressive thing about this puppy but what's the application to you you might ask well right now not a whole lot like I said I'm not recommending that you run out and buy one of these although if you are a baller then you could certainly do a lot worse know the applicability to you is that bleeding edge hardware like this always starts in the enterprise space and within whether it's 2 years or 10 years eventually makes its way down to the consumer level so the fact that it's finally started we finally have SSDs that not only even on a density level but also just on a sheer capacity level are catching up to hard drives means that that can't be that far away so this is cool we've actually got a giveaway to announce we've collaborated with rock at makers of gaming peripherals to give away not one not two not three not four not five not six not seven but eight all of their gaming mice so there's a couple of different models and depending on how you get drawn by the way you enter at the link to the forum the video description you can win either a cairo which has a 2,000 DPI sensor up to 4,000 stable with their overdrive mode as well as a clean economic design a soft touch service and a design that is optimized for both right and left-handed use or you could win yourself a Cova so that features their pro optic r6 sensor which is a 3500 DPI sensor which can handle up to 7000 with their overdrive mode it's got their a smart cast intuitive button layout that doubles the standard em1 and em2 functions it features two levels 16.8 million multi color illumination on the scroll wheel and the mouse rim and that one is designed to be ambidextrous as well so head over to the link in the video description and leave a comment on the video saying hey thanks for Rocket we love these kinds of giveaways you should do more of them because they're freaking awesome hmm but don't wait you've only got seven days to enter starting from the post date of this video so get on it alright guys so thanks for watching this first episode of holy it's just a cool product let us know if you like this format it's kind of similar to our old unboxing format but we're really going to stay focused on stuff that really is sort of out of this world so let us know if you want to see more of it if you dislike the video they'll hit the dislike button if you liked it hit like if you really liked it get subscribed to being even consider contributing by using our Amazon affiliate code to buy stuff there's instructions for how to do that up there find cool shirt like this one or even just giving us a contribution through our form you get a cool little contributor badge and I think that pretty much wraps it up so thanks again for watching Owen if you're looking for something else to watch don't miss any of our awesome CES 2015 coverage we're going to have some highlights maybe also linked up there in like a playlist or something like that lots of cool stuff at the show this year which if you're watching this video on vessel won't make any sense because you'll have watched this before our CES coverage starts but don't worry too much about that