Samsung’s V-NAND Has Arrived, and It’s Awesome.

When people ask me what one component on their PC they should upgrade my answer is always the same: get yourself a SSD. It’s not so much the raw performance characteristics that make the upgrade worth it, more all those things that many people hate about computers seem to melt away when you have a SSD behind it. All your applications load near instantly, your operating system feels more responsive and those random long lock ups where your hard drive seems to churn over for ages simply disappears. However the one drawback is their size and cost, being an order of magnitude above the good old spinning rust. Last year Samsung announced their plans to change that with V-NAND and today they deliver on that promise.

The Samsung 850 Pro is the first consumer drive to be released with V-NAND technology and is available in sizes up to 1TB. The initial promise of 128Gbit per chip has unfortunately fallen a little short of its mark with this current production version only delivering around 86Gbit per chip. This is probably due to economical reasons as the new chips under the hood of this SSD are smaller than the first prototypes which helps to increase the yield per wafer. Interestingly enough these chips are being produced on an older lithography process, 30nm instead of the current standard 20nm for most NAND chips. That might sound like a step back, and indeed it would be for most hardware, however the performance of the drive is pretty phenomenal, meaning that V-NAND is going to get even better with time.

Looking at the performance reviews the Samsung 850 Pro seems to be a top contender, if not the best, in pretty much all of the categories. In the world of SSDs having consistently high performance like this across a lot of categories is very unusual as typically a drive manufacturer will tune performance to a certain profile. Some favour random reads, others sustained write performance, but the Samsung 850 Pro seems to do pretty much all of them without breaking a sweat. However what really impressed me about the drive wasn’t so much the raw numbers, it was how the drive performed over time, even without the use of TRIM.

SSDs naturally degrade in performance over time, not due to the components wearing out but due to the nature of how they read and write data. Essentially it comes down to blocks needing to be checked to see if they’re free or not before they can be written to, a rather costly process. A new drive has all blank space which means these checks don’t need to be done but over time they’ll get into unknown states due to all the writing and rewriting. The TRIM command tells SSDs that certain blocks have been freed up, allowing the drive to flag them as unused, recovering some of the performance. The graph above shows what happens when the new Samsung 850 Pro reaches that performance degradation point even without the use of TRIM. If you compare that to other SSDs this kind of consistent performance almost looks like witchcraft but it’s just the V-NAND technology showing one of its many benefits.

Indeed Samsung is so confident in these new drives it’s giving all of them a 10 year warranty, something you can’t find even on good old spinning rust drives anymore. I’ll be honest when I first read about V-NAND I had a feeling that the first drives would likely be failure ridden write offs, like most new technologies are. However this new drive from Samsung appears to be the evolutionary step that all SSDs need to take as this first iteration device is just walking all over the competition. I was already sold on a Samsung SSD for my next PC build but I think an 850 Pro just made the top of my list.

Now if only those G-SYNC monitors could come out already, then I’d be set to build my next gen gaming PC.