Samsung 850 Pro is awesome

[Hauk]

Wow, just wow. These drives are worth every penny. Fresh OS install, all updates, boot times, everything I've done a thousand times is simply blazing with my new 850 Pro. Latest Samsung Magician is nice too, great to have all optimizations a click away. Rapid Mode works well. Great job Samsung..

 

[hojnikb]

Hopefully its gonna be issue free for the time being (considering the "newness" of the tech used.

 

[Hauk]

Agreed. So far so good..

 

[Puffnstuff]

Hope it holds up for you because if you have to rma then you'll do like I did and buy something else. Samsung has the worst rma process I've seen and if I were you I'd go register the drive with Samsung right now to increase the likelihood that you'll be able to file for support online.

 

[Charlie98]

Wow, just wow. These drives are worth every penny. Fresh OS install, all updates, boot times, everything I've done a thousand times is simply blazing with my new 850 Pro. Latest Samsung Magician is nice too, great to have all optimizations a click away. Rapid Mode works well. Great job Samsung..

Just be careful with the Magician optimizations, and Rapid... I had the optimizations change some settings I didn't want changed and had to go back in and change back, and there is a potential to lose data if you have a sudden power loss while it's writing in Rapid mode, although that potential is true for most SSDs, as I understand it there would be more data at risk because it is using the RAM as a cache. Eventually, I disabled Rapid, and, finally, uninstalled Magician altogether.

Like PuffnStuff, my 840Pro died and I had to use the very difficult RMA process to exchange my nice, new, expensive 840Pro for a refurb 840Pro. Just saying, and YMMV.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

What did you have previously? Another SSD, hybrid, or HDD?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Like PuffnStuff, my 840Pro died and I had to use the very difficult RMA process to exchange my nice, new, expensive 840Pro for a refurb 840Pro. Just saying, and YMMV.

For the price premium that you pay for Samsung, and with the supposed reliability, you would think that they could at least send out new drives under warranty, rather than refurb. My understanding is that this is what Crucial and OCZ do. (Then they re-sell the refurbs on the open market.)

 

[Hauk]

What did you have previously? Another SSD, hybrid, or HDD?

Phew lots of previous, Raptors in raid, OCZ SSDs, Intel X-25M, 520's. Kept an Intel 520 for critical storage.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Phew lots of previous, Raptors in raid, OCZ SSDs, Intel X-25M, 520's. Kept an Intel 520 for critical storage.

So was the huge difference going from SSD to 850 Pro, or Raptors to 850 Pro? Cause I went from an OCZ Vertex to an 840 Pro and aside from benchmarks I couldn't actually tell any difference

 

[Puffnstuff]

When my ocz and adata ssd's went out they sent me a new drive. Samsung sent me a refurb.

 

[Hauk]

So was the huge difference going from SSD to 850 Pro, or Raptors to 850 Pro? Cause I went from an OCZ Vertex to an 840 Pro and aside from benchmarks I couldn't actually tell any difference

In reviews and on paper the drive shows well, but it feels tremendously faster, perhaps due to Rapid Mode. Same OS settings for both drives in the comparison below, Rapid Mode enabled the only variance. The Intel 520 is a year old but still 100% as I kept write activity to a minimum:

Intel 520 60GB:


Samsung 850 Pro 128GB:

 

[Matt84]

Turn RAPID off and you will get true Samsung 850 Pro numbers. RAPID is RAM caching

 

[Hauk]

Turn RAPID off and you will get true Samsung 850 Pro numbers. RAPID is RAM caching

Understood, he asked if there was a perceivable difference, I noted with Rapid enabled there was, thought I'd include a synthetic just for display purpose.

 

[Charlie98]

When I was running Rapid on my 840, it felt a little snappier vs my 60GB Agility3, which is understandable, and against the non-Rapid 840 if just marginally so. It seemed like when I had Excel open, etc, it would recover quicker on a big save or something.

as I kept write activity to a minimum:

Why? It's a tool, use it. I dump everything on my SSDs because they are faster than the HDD... that's why I bought them.

 

[Hauk]

Why? It's a tool, use it. I dump everything on my SSDs because they are faster than the HDD... that's why I bought them.

Most important are quick reads for texture loading during gaming, but yes they are "tools" to me now, much less paranoid.

 

[Charlie98]

...but yes they are "tools" to me now, much less paranoid.

You are learning, Grasshopper!