Gadgetory

we don't often do videos about SSDs anymore we look at them I don't think Samsung has done anything visually interesting to their SSD lineup since they ever so why would we make a video about the 850 Pro well because we've got four of them also there's some really cool technology in them that I think is worth talking about G skills new Ripjaws 4 Series is their ultimate ddr4 memory with speeds of up to three thousand three hundred and thirty three megahertz available click now to learn more no but seriously this video isn't meant to be so much a review as a behind the scenes look at what we're using for the storage for the server that hosts the Linus tech tips com community forum and more importantly why we made that choice now a huge part of the story here is the NAND flash the actual storage chips on the drives the introduction of the 850 Pro marked the first retail availability of a drive using vertical or 3d end this comes with a couple of significant benefits so typically the way that flash and micro processors get cheaper over time is that after significant research and expense clever folks like Intel and Samsung moved to smaller and smaller manufacturing processes to allow them to build the same device with less raw material or more advanced devices with the same amount of raw material increasing performance and lowering overall costs in the long run the problem with this is that for flash in particular as it gets more and more dense its performance drops and so does its endurance the number of times it can be written to before it's not reliable anymore so for several generations of SSDs much of the performance and warranty improvement that we've seen has been from among other things SSD manufacturers finding ways of using wear leveling to cleverly spread the load out across all the chips in a drive or even make the best use of limited flash performance with really magic like on-the-fly data compression and decompression but now here comes vertical man to the rescue so by stacking layers instead of spreading them out two dimensionally Samsung can achieve the density and therefore capacity that they need these are one terabyte drives we're using while using a bigger manufacturing process this ends up using nearly the same raw material in manufacturing but gives back some of the performance and reliability that advanced SSD controllers have been compensating for over the last few years with the voodoo magic I mentioned before Samsung then turns around and pairs this faster more reliable flash with a modern advance three core controller and up to a gig a low-power ddr2 for cache and Lola the a 50 pro is about as fast as a SATA 3 SSD can be while being rated even at its lowest capacity to handle 40 gigs per day of writes for the entire duration of its 10-year warranty which isn't nearly as impressive as the 128 gig drive Samsung says they've had in their lab for over 8,000 terabytes of writes and it just keeps going and then I guess on top of that you also get support for rapid their SSD acceleration with sort of Ram cache thing that can be enabled through the SSD magician' monitoring and tweaking utility full drive encryption support and Samsung's easy to use cloning software so all that out of the way what are we using these for well right now in the server we're running Western Digital re series enterprise grade hard drives for the forum software and the database and we've discovered some interesting issues especially when we launch giveaways and contests in spite of cpu load being quite manageable we've been getting some weird issues oops okay I put these boxes here where they'll be safe sort of background topics so we've discovered some interesting issues whenever we launch giveaways and contests in spite of pretty manageable cpu load we've been getting some weird issues with errors during account creation as people are rushing to make accounts and during these giveaways and we narrowed that down to a storage performance limitation so that is where the a 50 pros come in starting when these get deployed the entire line is tech tips comm site will be solid-state based we know that while unlike Samsung's enterprise-grade solutions these prosumer drives don't offer end-to-end data protection or power loss protection but our system uses a battery backup to protect against unexpected shutdowns and having data loss due to that so we're willing to risk using consumer grade Hardware in order to get the raw performance and reliability that we'll get with 850 pros as well as the capacity and price as sort of balancing all those things now in the server we'll be using our four drives responsibly one will be for the operating system 2 will be for the database in a raid 1 setup for protection from hardware failure and 1/4 will be a periodic manual copy from the raid 1 so actually triple redundancy but since we had Samsung send the drives to us to forward to the data center we figured why not see exactly how much performance could be extracted from them if we decided to go crazy and build all 4 terabyte raid 0 array the answer is well over one gigabyte per second and here's some crystal disk mark and a s SSD numbers for the SSD geeks out there but one thing that disappointed me a little bit here nothing to do with the drives is that while they're capable of much more than this it looks like intel's on-board RAID controller is still a bottleneck for such a high throughput configuration even on x99 the good news is that for people running more reasonable two or three drive raid 0 config intel's raid driver passes through the trim command to keep it running at peak efficiency so aside from the reliability concerns of raid 0 remember if one drive fails all the array data is lost it's a somewhat viable configuration for SSD users that allows them to overcome the bottleneck that is the state of 300 face until they bump up against the next bottleneck in the system at which point might be time to go MDOT - or SATA Express or whatever else the case may be anyway this was fun while it lasted but it's time to send these to our forum house so we can start delivering you guys even better website performance and if you haven't checked it out already you guys should head over to Linus tech tips calm you've got a great community over there discussing tech and gaming and all the stuff that goes on on the internet these days anyway thank you for watching this video like this video if you liked it dislike it if you just liked it leave a comment letting me know how amazing one terabyte SSDs in row 0 or my face on them or whatever it is people comment on youtube videos check out the link in the video description if you want to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution or even just change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so whenever you buy a new SSD we get a small kickback it helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as 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