The Samsung 840/840 Pro SSD thread

I am getting Read:524MB Write:491MB on my Thinkpad T420S from my 256GB 840PRO, amazing upgrade from stock HDD

Limey77 said:

So I've bitten the bullet and ordered the i5, 16gb of corsair vengeance RAM, and the Samsung 840 Pro. Everything should be arriving on Saturday so I hope to do the work over the weekend and have couple of questions.

I'm planning to just format the ssd and put it in the main bay and do the command+r to download a new copy of ML. Will I need to update the ssd firmware first? If so, what's the best way of doing that, I understand I'll have to use a pc which is ok.

When I take the old drive out and put it in the external enclosure can I keep it as a bootable drive and use it for a Timemachine backup? Or should I reformat it and wipe ML from it? I believe I can't partition it without deleting ML.

Thanks for any advice.

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You have 2 options here:

1- Simply keep the drive as-is (bootable OS X) and also assign it as the Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine will create a new folder for your backups which won't interfere with your bootable OS X, although it will slowly consume all the space available on the disk.

2- You can boot to the drive and use Disk Utility to non-destructively add a second partition for Time Machine and give it a size limit for max TM growth.


You can either do a fresh install with data migration to the new SSD, or clone your existing drive to the SSD using Disk Utility "restore" or a clone program such as CarbonCopyCloner.

-howard

Sorry for Before

Here are screenshots of my Black magic results. Sorry I botched the first post from my iPhone.

I am running an IvyBridge quad-core i7 2.3ghz Mac Mini with a Samsung 840 Pro 128gb and the 1tb Apple HDD, as well as 16gb of Crucial RAM. My Samsung 840 Pro is the only bootable drive in the machine. I'm getting 30 second startup times (which is kind of slow for me going from a macbook pro running lion on an M4). Sometimes I will get a slightly slower write speed and it will say i can write 2 less types (anyone else's writes fluctuate like that?)

I'm trying to figure out what the best way for me to configure my hard drives for optimal performance. As of now I just made folders on my empty HDD and moved all my movies, music, etc. to that drive and redirected iTunes, Downloads, and a few of my other applications to save their files there. I know there is a better way to do this. Should both my drives be bootable? help a brother out.

This is a screen shot of my Samsung 840 Pro BM results I occasionally get in my scans. Anyone else notice this fluctuation? Should I be using my 5 year warranty?

A short question for the consumers among us..

Hellhammer said:

Intel is already using 20nm NAND in their SSD 335. The successor of SSD 520 is still a question but if Intel's roadmap is still the same, then it will just be SSD 525 which is SSD 520 with 20nm NAND (and possible firmware tweaks, but no major differences).



That's true, Samsung told me that a Mac version of Samsung SSD Magician should be coming early next year.



I think you're mixing reliability with endurance. Reliability is very hard to test as there are so many components that can fail. For example the 5200-hour bug in Crucial m4 took months to be discovered as it required the SSD to be used for over 5200 hours.

However, endurance can be tested and I've done that for the SSD 840:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

The figures are based on 1,000 P/E cycles rating, but the 120GB SSD 840 in XtremeSystems.org has done nearly 2,000 already, so the figure given by Samsung is very conservative.

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Reading your really interesting article mentioned above, means for me, I may have done the right choice with ordering a new Samsung 840. For the one's among us with older SAT2 technology it would not make much sense anyways in terms of speed.
In my case using this laptop with a Samsung 840 only for casual office and internet work, I may never hit the 1000 cycles. Am I correct here?

For the consumer, this means "a cycle" defined in the article may not even occur once in a consumer life.

Would a complete reinstall of the OSX on the SSD qualify equivalent as one cycle in the consumer world?

AlexMaximus said:

Reading your really interesting article mentioned above, means for me, I may have done the right choice with ordering a new Samsung 840. For the one's among us with older SAT2 technology it would not make much sense anyways in terms of speed.
In my case using this laptop with a Samsung 840 only for casual office and internet work, I may never hit the 1000 cycles. Am I correct here?

For the consumer, this means "a cycle" defined in the article may not even occur once in a consumer life.

Would a complete reinstall of the OSX on the SSD qualify equivalent as one cycle in the consumer world?

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One P/E cycle means programming and erasing every NAND cell in the SSD once. In layman terms, that means you write 256GB to a 256GB drive (or 128GB to a 128GB drive). When you've written 256GB, you've consumed one P/E cycle out of the available 1,000 (hence using 0.1% of your SSD's life).

Reinstalling OS X writes less than 10GB as far as I know, so even that doesn't constitute as one P/E cycle.

Am I correct in assuming that the hardware based encryption that these drives use is not usable on the mac? I read it uses bios/ATA HD passwords to do it so I think that leaves us out?

Samsung 840, 500g

The SSD is easy to install and works just fine, here are some stats:

AlexMaximus said:

For the one's among us with older SAT2 technology it would not make much sense anyways in terms of speed.

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For sequential there is no benefit. For random and other areas it still has an impact. An 840 Pro is still going to be faster than an 830 on a SATA2 link. Just not when you test bandwidth as you are link limited.

Shaddow825 said:

Am I correct in assuming that the hardware based encryption that these drives use is not usable on the mac? I read it uses bios/ATA HD passwords to do it so I think that leaves us out?

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The 840 Pro is compatible with Mac OS X for sure. Hell the Samsung 830 is the drive Apple uses if you buy an SSD in your new mac, whether its standalone or a fusion drive.
lol how did we do it if it wasnt compatible. That Crucial M500 looks pretty neat. I'd rather have that than the stock 1tb but idk about the reliability.

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Moksel said:

The SSD is easy to install and works just fine, here are some stats:

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You arent getting the numbers I have seen by other 500gb 840 Pro's. Your write speed should be faster.

Amrives said:

You arent getting the numbers I have seen by other 500gb 840 Pro's. Your write speed should be faster.

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If this is a 500 GB (see his title), it is probably not a Pro, and the speeds are about right I think.

R

Just bought a 250GB 840 (non Pro) and a brand new 13" cMBP base model. Enabled FileVault and the Write speeds took a ~50MB/s hit. Read speeds did not have any changes. Stock firmware dxt06b0q.

Write: 250
Read: 500

Going to update to the new firmware dxt07b0q and try again soon.

rageguy said:

...

Going to update to the new firmware dxt07b0q and try again soon.

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Hi,

Just curious how you are going to upgrade the firmware via your Mac? Do we have to make a bootable Windows usb stick/rom?

I have the firmware too but I didn't see a convenient way to upgrade.

Amrives said:

The 840 Pro is compatible with Mac OS X for sure. Hell the Samsung 830 is the drive Apple uses if you buy an SSD in your new mac, whether its standalone or a fusion drive.
lol how did we do it if it wasnt compatible. That Crucial M500 looks pretty neat. I'd rather have that than the stock 1tb but idk about the reliability.

Click to expand...

Then how do I use the built in hardware encryption on the drive?

Just went from the stock 500GB HD to the 840 SSD, LOVING IT! Don't have any technical screen caps, but my 45GB iTunes library takes only a second to load, as does my mail. Mail was taking up to 7 seconds to load before.

Thank you

Hellhammer said:

One P/E cycle means programming and erasing every NAND cell in the SSD once. In layman terms, that means you write 256GB to a 256GB drive (or 128GB to a 128GB drive). When you've written 256GB, you've consumed one P/E cycle out of the available 1,000 (hence using 0.1% of your SSD's life).

Reinstalling OS X writes less than 10GB as far as I know, so even that doesn't constitute as one P/E cycle.

Click to expand...

If thats true, that means that the 840 is still a rocket good drive, even in the non- Pro version. But that means also a lot of people will buy Pro and they never ever need it in terms of P/E cycle.

Thanks by the way for your great expertise, I value this forum very much!
Outstanding crowd here, really!

CarreraGuy said:

Hi,

Just curious how you are going to upgrade the firmware via your Mac? Do we have to make a bootable Windows usb stick/rom?

I have the firmware too but I didn't see a convenient way to upgrade.

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Samsung offers a bootable .iso that can flash the firmware except it doesn't work no matter what I do. So you have two options:

1. Take out SSD, plug it into a Windows box, flash with Magician in Windows
2. Bootcamp your Mac, flash with Magician in Windows

I'm doing #2. I don't like taking apart my Mac every time just for this.

840 Pro 512

- 15" MacBook Pro Early 2011
- MacBookPro8,2
- Intel Core i7
- 2 GHz
- 8MB Memory
- Bus Speed
- Serial-ATA's Link Speed 6 Gigabit & Negotiated Link Speed 6 Gigabit
- TRIM:Off
- OS X Mountain Lion


- 512GB
- 840 Pro
- Main bay

rageguy said:

Samsung offers a bootable .iso that can flash the firmware except it doesn't work no matter what I do. So you have two options:

1. Take out SSD, plug it into a Windows box, flash with Magician in Windows
2. Bootcamp your Mac, flash with Magician in Windows

I'm doing #2. I don't like taking apart my Mac every time just for this.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I might just wait for Samsung to release a Mac/Linux utility. I have bootcamp on my iMac but not on my Macbook

Also do you know by chance if I need the firmware if I'm running Trim? I read the firmware only fixes/enhances the 'dirty write' issue.

Thanks again!

Hexley said:

Anyone installed a 840 non-Pro into a 2010 13" MacBook Pro with sata 3Gb/s? How is the write/read speed?

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Let me take a wild guess here: 265-275MB/s Write, 265-275MB/s Read. Apparently if you enable FileVault it is 250MB/s Write, 265-275MB/s Read.
Anything that tests under 270MB/s will be exactly the same (ie 4K randoms, super brutal workload iops). Anything over will not be able to go any faster.

I was going to get the 256 840 but newegg was out so I bought one of their sale model 240gb's it is a Monster sad. rated for 560R and 520W and I am getting on average 300W and 500R way better then the Seagate Hybrid 500GB I was using before and I know the ssd is Sata 3 and the Seagate is sata 2.

Personally for the price I paid for the Monster sad I am very happy, got it on a 3 days sale with next day shipping for $119 plus 12.00 for S&H

Hexley said:

Anyone installed a 840 non-Pro into a 2010 13" MacBook Pro with sata 3Gb/s? How is the write/read speed?

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Installed a 500 GB 840 in a base 2010 13" just over two months ago. Works as expected. Terrific upgrade.

iArch said:

Installed a 500 GB 840 in a base 2010 13" just over two months ago. Works as expected. Terrific upgrade.

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Ditto, installed my 840 500gb Samsung non-pro on my 2010 mbp 13" Snow Leopard. Works great so far with Trim enabled, factory firmware, so far so good knock on wood.

Just installed an 840 non-pro from a 5400rpm into a 2009 MBP13 and damn I can last the rest of the year now or till the retina 15's refresh is available