The Samsung 840 Pro was reviewed earlier, and it made a very good impression. That SSD flies!!! I won’t blame enthusiasts recommending these who people who can’t afford to spend a lot on such SSDs, but you get addicted to the performance it has. Something that one rarely feels, even at the time when there are a lot of companies rolling out SSD drives.
It was obvious that the only way to reflect such potential of such SSD drives is by doing series of tests. Not just synthetic tests, but also simulate real world tests, endurance testing to ensure that even with a massive torture of 25TB+ host writes that runs at least 36- 48 hours in a row. And you can’t just stop there, you have to continue- like updating the benchmark database whenever a new firmware comes out (the world wide known reviewers do this provided they have the drive with them or gets purged from the graph database). It’s a very time consuming review even though SSD drives are pretty quick. Just how many reviews in India bother to test TRIM, endurance, performance level with different fill, compressible and incompressible data? For such people, all drives will perform practically similar. It needs time, it needs patience- and you can’t be stuck with the same benchmarks over and over again.
Using the laser guided temperature reader to read out the temperature from the surface of the casing with an open test rig and temperature read out on an air conditioner? Awww, that’s cute!!!!
Reason why manufacturers should make sure that reviewers know about solid state drives, such as the incident of a review which only had 2 benchmarks that would take 1 hour to complete and don’t maintain a graph database to properly will not find any potential flaws and flush down consumer’s money down the drain leaving a bad taste and questioning one’s credibility. Unsurprisingly, I got the same drive that the previous reviewer tested (same serial number). End result was that in reality the same drive has multiple write issue, unable to load up as a primary drive, complete and/or partial freeze. Most likely this rev version of the drive was one of the defects where the company made a recall few months ago. Thanks to this incident, I know which rev version not to buy. You’ll never know if these units are lying around for retail, because they sure did for reviewers!
If you think endurance testing is a waste, you need to be aware of an issue of a particular drive which got awards from certain review sites, but close analysis by some sites who bothered to do endurance testing found out that the drive’s flash NAND degrades eventually. It was also found out by others that many review sites got a different flash NAND chip compared to others, and it had different marketing. It was then a sour taste developed that flash NAND chips were not of the same in the same model. Another source also pointed out an issue of relabeling FLASH NAND over the existing chips, something that the manufacturer themselves never even knew about it until a reviewer highlighted it.
Sometimes there are a new rev version of controllers and manufacturers of the SSD do not follow a rev version system on their packaging. So user will not sure if it’s a new or improved one of not. Such was the case with another SSD. The newer ones were better, but the manufacturer didn’t release the newer firmware that fixes TRIM issue, despite the fact that the rival brands using the same controllers fixed it a long time ago. In the middle of it, the manufacturer used the new version of the controller which was said to consume lower power. I unfortunately got the one with the older rev version controller, but interestingly there was no rev version written on the packaging or on the SSD drive.
Hardware BBQ tries to keep up, finds, adopts and uses benchmarks and testing that will ensure its readers that they will get the good stuff in their hands! If I can do as much as possible with the limited resources and even time in hand, shame on those who can’t, but considered as ‘Tier 1’ reviewers.
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