EVO 850 Pro 2TB - little or no market demand?

[jn77]

I read a couple of articles (Not on Tom's) That at CES when asked about 2TB SSD's Samsung said they have them, they are ready for market, but "Samsung" felt that the demand for them from the market was either very low or not there.

Is Samsung smoking crack? I am looking to put an mSATA and 2 SSD's in my Alienware laptop and have been holding out (Holding out upgrading from hard drives) to SSD's because they don't have enough space and cost too much.

If I could get a 2TB mSATA for a boot drive and then take the 2 hard drive bays and put a 2TB SSD in each bay, that puts me at 6TB on my laptop.

*Why do I need 6TB on my laptop? I work with 80mp medium format images and edit 4k video on my laptop.

No I don't need that for email, Chrome, Firefox, Playing WOW? who plays wow anymore anyway....

 

[okcnaline]

Very low demand. Most gamers or enthusiasts deal with 240-250 GB SSD and one 1TB HDD, and 2TB isn't useful anyway. I could see some potential crazy people who don't understand tech like a S****** of us on this forum does, along with some guys who kinda find this useful (workstation-dependent people who need absolute power) who MIGHT buy it.

 

[rhysiam]

The 1TB 850 EVOs are $450, 2TB models would be priced at double that, probably plus first-to-market/low-volume tax. You'd be talking about sinking about $3K on storage alone?

While you can probably justify that kind of investment, I don't think there are many in your camp. Is it really worth Samsung to ship and support a device for such a small market? Samsung don't really seem to chase niche markets.

Can you go external? Pick up a 2x2 of 1x4 bay USB 3 UASP enclosures and chuck in 4 1TB SSDs? You'd be sacrificing some performance, but (particularly for sequential transfers - which you'll will be exactly what you need for video editing) not a heap. It'll still be far faster than mechanical disks.

 

[the_consolegamer]

I agree with the OP. I have been waiting for a 2TB, sub $1000 consumer SSD for 2 years, particularly because I am sick of upgrade fatigue. They are also the highest volume size possible before drive formatting becomes an issue on older systems (hence it can also be a more portable drive).

 

[tomhot]

You can use 2 x mSATA samsung 850 1Tb in a double adapter to SATA. Then you have a 2Tb SSD !! no problem

 

[USAFRet]

If I could get a 2TB mSATA for a boot drive and then take the 2 hard drive bays and put a 2TB SSD in each bay, that puts me at 6TB on my laptop.

*Why do I need 6TB on my laptop? I work with 80mp medium format images and edit 4k video on my laptop.

You are an edge case.
6TB of SSD space is rarely if ever needed for the vast majority. Especially at these prices.
6TB of spinning drive space is maybe a couple hundred, not a couple thousand it would cost for SSD. And most people do not need that much SSD space.

Except for me, all of my family members needs would be met with a single 250GB drive.

 

[BadBamBam]

I am a user of a 1TB Samsung SSD and I can tell you I'm offloading games to make space for new ones all the time and if Samsung would release the 2TB SSD's I would buy 2 of them right away. I need and use the awesome performance and space of SSD all the time. I have a lot of DATA I keep on regular hard drives that I don't access all the time but I would change my 3 2TB and 1 1TB drives to SSD's without hesitation. I changed my 500GB SSD as soon as they made the 1TB available and am waiting for larger ones before I swap out all the SNAIL Drives.

My computer boots about 20 times faster with the SSD as a System drive. Incredible performance worth the expense anytime.

For me anyway..

 

[Darwinian]

We use 1TB EVO 840 and 850 SSD's in our NAS systems. They're great. If 2TB SSDs were available (for roughly 2x the price of 1TB SSDs) then we'd buy 20 of them tomorrow. I'm delaying purchasing more 1TB SSDs in the hope that 2TB SSDs will be out soon...

 

[WaynePCman]

We use 1TB EVO 840 and 850 SSD's in our NAS systems. They're great. If 2TB SSDs were available (for roughly 2x the price of 1TB SSDs) then we'd buy 20 of them tomorrow. I'm delaying purchasing more 1TB SSDs in the hope that 2TB SSDs will be out soon...

Same here, I'd be buying at least 20 as well, and am holding off on purchasing more 1TB drives.

 

[jhonnyonthespot]

• 950 PRO NVMe: September
• 850 PRO: 2TB August
• 850 EVO: 2TB July
• 850 EVO: 4TB December

 

[hpmoon]

God, some days I wish that all the gamerz would disappear, except that SOMETIMES they're the technology drivers.

Not in this discussion! But for the world outside gaming (it does exist), consider what it takes to create things: terrabytes and terrabytes of high-bitrate video is last year's present under the Christmas tree. The need for reliability and fastest speeds from physical media for 4K high-bitrate digital video is a foregone conclusion. The foot-dragging by these conglomerates is infuriating, and yet they've got a cheering section from gamerz who still live in their parents' basements...

 

[rhysiam]

God, some days I wish that all the gamerz would disappear, except that SOMETIMES they're the technology drivers.

Not in this discussion! But for the world outside gaming (it does exist), consider what it takes to create things: terrabytes and terrabytes of high-bitrate video is last year's present under the Christmas tree. The need for reliability and fastest speeds from physical media for 4K high-bitrate digital video is a foregone conclusion. The foot-dragging by these conglomerates is infuriating, and yet they've got a cheering section from gamerz who still live in their parents' basements...

All most of us have said is that there is a SMALL market for this. No one is denying that the market exists, it's just that it's a small one.

For the majority of people editing 4K video, mechanical storage will do the job at a tiny fraction of the cost of an SSD. Surely no one with any sense of budget at all would consider using an SSD for archival/long term video storage. So I assume you're appealing for SSDs for active video editing. In that case most video editing tasks rely on sequential transfers. A high speed 7200RPM drive, like the WD Black is $210 for 4TB and still manages a 170MBps + for sequential transfers. If Samsung were to release a 4TB SSD it would cost something in the vicinity of $2.5K and, because of the 6Gbps limit on SATA, it would only be 3 times faster for sequential writes. 10 times the price for 3 times the performance. That's not a great deal for most people!

Then if you are one of those people who would be prepared to spend big on fast, high capacity storage, say you are a serious video editor type who has those requirements... you have Thunderbolt. There are plenty of 8 bay thunderbolt enclosures which can (with current tech) provide 8TB of SSD storage at insane transfer speeds. Yes, they are extremely expensive, but you're talking about about bleeding edge performance and capacity for a tiny niche market... sorry but that always has and always will cost a lot more.

The combination the 3D NAND and TLC becoming increasingly mainstream (and gradually paying off the early R&D investments that go into them) could see much more affordable NAND in the future which. Combine that with the U.2 connector (formerly SFF-8639), which overcomes the SATA bottleneck, and we might just see cheaper, larger and faster drives.

But for now, you accuse them of "foot dragging" and us of "cheering" (and being gamerz)... with respect, I just don't think you understand the market or tech. We haven't seen many (?any?) mainstream SSDs exceed $1000. As prices drop, the add a new capacity at around the $1K mark. As prices drop I expect we'll see 2TB SSDs at or around that same $1K ceiling. It would be seriously hard to make a business case to invest the necessary R&D into a new controller which can address and handle the error correction, etc, for extra NAND until the resulting drives are sufficiently affordable to justify the investment. The top tier who need more than terrabytes of faster-than-200MBps storage are going to have to pay for Thunderbolt and I don't think it makes any sense to blame "gamerz" or the market for that reality.

 

[hpmoon]

God, some days I wish that all the gamerz would disappear, except that SOMETIMES they're the technology drivers.

Not in this discussion! But for the world outside gaming (it does exist), consider what it takes to create things: terrabytes and terrabytes of high-bitrate video is last year's present under the Christmas tree. The need for reliability and fastest speeds from physical media for 4K high-bitrate digital video is a foregone conclusion. The foot-dragging by these conglomerates is infuriating, and yet they've got a cheering section from gamerz who still live in their parents' basements...

All most of us have said is that there is a SMALL market for this. No one is denying that the market exists, it's just that it's a small one.

For the majority of people editing 4K video, mechanical storage will do the job at a tiny fraction of the cost of an SSD. Surely no one with any sense of budget at all would consider using an SSD for archival/long term video storage. So I assume you're appealing for SSDs for active video editing. In that case most video editing tasks rely on sequential transfers. A high speed 7200RPM drive, like the WD Black is $210 for 4TB and still manages a 170MBps + for sequential transfers. If Samsung were to release a 4TB SSD it would cost something in the vicinity of $2.5K and, because of the 6Gbps limit on SATA, it would only be 3 times faster for sequential writes. 10 times the price for 3 times the performance. That's not a great deal for most people!

Then if you are one of those people who would be prepared to spend big on fast, high capacity storage, say you are a serious video editor type who has those requirements... you have Thunderbolt. There are plenty of 8 bay thunderbolt enclosures which can (with current tech) provide 8TB of SSD storage at insane transfer speeds. Yes, they are extremely expensive, but you're talking about about bleeding edge performance and capacity for a tiny niche market... sorry but that always has and always will cost a lot more.

The combination the 3D NAND and TLC becoming increasingly mainstream (and gradually paying off the early R&D investments that go into them) could see much more affordable NAND in the future which. Combine that with the U.2 connector (formerly SFF-8639), which overcomes the SATA bottleneck, and we might just see cheaper, larger and faster drives.

But for now, you accuse them of "foot dragging" and us of "cheering" (and being gamerz)... with respect, I just don't think you understand the market or tech. We haven't seen many (?any?) mainstream SSDs exceed $1000. As prices drop, the add a new capacity at around the $1K mark. As prices drop I expect we'll see 2TB SSDs at or around that same $1K ceiling. It would be seriously hard to make a business case to invest the necessary R&D into a new controller which can address and handle the error correction, etc, for extra NAND until the resulting drives are sufficiently affordable to justify the investment. The top tier who need more than terrabytes of faster-than-200MBps storage are going to have to pay for Thunderbolt and I don't think it makes any sense to blame "gamerz" or the market for that reality.

You have got a much more temperate perspective than mine, I must admit. I suppose I am just so fatigued by the naivete of populist consumerism which is so ironically pro-corporate in this regard, even in this technology sector that owns a legendary narrative of innovating hard in a free market.

I think you're pretty tolerant and idealistic about the poetic challenges offered by corporations like Samsung who complain about lack of demand. As you must know, with such an evident baseline of knowledge about corporate strategy, the greater the consolidation in their industry, the less they care to innovate for the sake of raising the bar on specifications. So naturally, their most intense energy is spent on cultivating a populist cheering section, ever eager to hear from them that "nobody's willing to pay for that except the big spenders" -- and as a result, their profit margins at the top end increase while they bleed out old technology with the best margins (and least efforts at re-tooling) to the gullible masses. From Intel CPUs to 1080p displays on laptops, best-available-technology has always been delayed by half a decade, or a whole decade, because of the stupid bottom line. This villain of market economics would be minimized if consumers stopped drinking the Kool-Aid and adopted the posture of an adversarial relationship with the like of Samsung.

Don't forget one of the early quotes in this discussion: "when asked about 2TB SSD's Samsung said they have them, they are ready for market, but 'Samsung' felt that the demand for them from the market was either very low or not there."

Ultimately, you're the guy who calls B.S. on that, or you're the gal who blushes and nods.

As for video editing, my Caviar Black 7200rpm drives are still a bottleneck, and I'm running a pair of terabyte SSDs in RAID 0 for active editing projects (archiving the other ten onto low-speed archival spinners). My latest strategy is to use removable SATA3-native (not even eSATA) 2.5" cartridges with terrabyte SSDs into a Vantec dock. I am never buying another spinning drive again, but for redundant archiving (to complement CrashPlan cloud backups).

There are more of us than any gamer assumes; the creative class is growing in the United States as our manufacturing declines. The whole net neturality debate was inspired by 40% of ALL Internet traffic being consumed by Netflix and YouTube. Video demands speed and space. The free market has been pathetic at meeting that easy, vanilla demand -- in strategically pernicious and thought-policing form. Anti-trust law has done nothing to stop them.

 

[rhysiam]

I hear where you're coming from and in some areas I totally agree with you. Recently I've tried to help a number of people to buy a half decent laptop and am constantly amazed by how much you need to spend to get the basics like a decent display (doesn't have to be amazing, just not a POS 768p TN panel) and an SSD. Most people, I suspect, would be vastly better served with a Pentium laptop with a 4GB RAM, 1080P IPS display and a 256GB SSD than an i7 with a 1TB HDD... but such a laptop just doesn't exist and it's infuriating.

The situation with SSDs, I suggest, is a bit different. The inescapable fact is that NAND is expensive and the more you add, the more the drive is going to cost... there's just no shortcuts there. In addition to that, controllers have a limited number of channels and there's a limited amount of NAND that can be addressed with each channel, it's just not as simple as slapping twice the NAND on an existing controller.

That means larger drives need new and more complex controllers and which is R&D money, and, very significantly for SSDs, a lot QA testing which has bitten Samsung with the 840 EVO and others (like OCZ who basically went bankrupt for short-cutting QA processes).

I'd personally be surprised if Samsung is sitting on a fully validated and ready-to-launch 2TB SSD and is just waiting. I've no doubt they're testing and investing in it, but a launch-ready product with all the QA passed... not so sure.

The biggest growth market for SSDs will come from stealing market share from HDDs, and that means bigger and cheaper drives. Given that Samsung has very little presence or profit from the HDD sector, the suggestion that they could launch products capable of taking market share from traditional HDDs and are simply choosing not to seems strange to me.

I dunno, maybe you're right... but I do think the high cost of NAND is the biggest barrier at present to larger SSDs. At least 3D NAND and TLC should both brings gains in that area and things are progressing.

 

[hpmoon]

I hear where you're coming from and in some areas I totally agree with you. Recently I've tried to help a number of people to buy a half decent laptop and am constantly amazed by how much you need to spend to get the basics like a decent display (doesn't have to be amazing, just not a POS 768p TN panel) and an SSD. Most people, I suspect, would be vastly better served with a Pentium laptop with a 4GB RAM, 1080P IPS display and a 256GB SSD than an i7 with a 1TB HDD... but such a laptop just doesn't exist and it's infuriating.

The situation with SSDs, I suggest, is a bit different. The inescapable fact is that NAND is expensive and the more you add, the more the drive is going to cost... there's just no shortcuts there. In addition to that, controllers have a limited number of channels and there's a limited amount of NAND that can be addressed with each channel, it's just not as simple as slapping twice the NAND on an existing controller.

That means larger drives need new and more complex controllers and which is R&D money, and, very significantly for SSDs, a lot QA testing which has bitten Samsung with the 840 EVO and others (like OCZ who basically went bankrupt for short-cutting QA processes).

I'd personally be surprised if Samsung is sitting on a fully validated and ready-to-launch 2TB SSD and is just waiting. I've no doubt they're testing and investing in it, but a launch-ready product with all the QA passed... not so sure.

The biggest growth market for SSDs will come from stealing market share from HDDs, and that means bigger and cheaper drives. Given that Samsung has very little presence or profit from the HDD sector, the suggestion that they could launch products capable of taking market share from traditional HDDs and are simply choosing not to seems strange to me.

I dunno, maybe you're right... but I do think the high cost of NAND is the biggest barrier at present to larger SSDs. At least 3D NAND and TLC should both brings gains in that area and things are progressing.

Interesting nuance about how NAND is expensive and that cost could increase geometrically with capacity past 1TB. And yes, I have bad memories from my early-adopter OCZ SSDs, seeing how painful that was for both customer and manufacturer when the hardware kept failing. I suppose this begins with the simple observation that, e.g., my Crucial M500 is 960gb, while Samsung EVOs are at a full 1TB rating, the distinction being how much slack Crucial gives itself anticipating errors and poorer performance in their non-flagship model. But I wouldn't focus so much on Samsung to compare, merely because they were the offered rumor here, proclaiming that a 2TB drive was ready but "not worth selling." We should really point our fingers at Seagate/Hitachi/Western Digital/whatever the hell combination of those are merged to kill: we know how they behaved recently after their hurricane patsy giving them a few years to price-gouge and suspend innovation with increased profit margins. I am simply an evangelist for turning up the volume on an adversarial relationship, instead of the fanboy-ism (yes, usually from gamerz) that tends to conclude, "I don't need that" -- as if from the center of the universe. I suppose it feels very powerful to kill people for hours on end, even in virtual reality.

 

[yumri4]

i think samsung will release a 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and bigger SSDs but only when there is a bigger market for it. At this time though the only market for huge SSDs is us who want to use them as storage drives and this is a very niche market at this time. The marketing for hard drives is get 1 SSD for your boot drive with only a few high use applications on it then get as many traditional hard drives as you need for all the space that you want. I personally know that there is a market for it but once we see the price most of us will rethink it because of the price and still wait for the price to get down to where the price of a 1TB SSD is now. More realistically a 2TB Samsung SSD will be an EVO drive not a Pro drive as they use different kinds of NAND Flash in them same speed to us but different kinds of NAND Flash. Now when Samsung feels like it is time for them to release a 2TB SSD i will probably buy it as soon as it is down to an aviable price but that is what they are saying. Most people are only going to buy it if it is cheap enough that it will not cost more than 2 1TB SSDs while of course still not doubling the cost of the rest of the computer.

 

[WaynePCman]

• 950 PRO NVMe: September
• 850 PRO: 2TB August
• 850 EVO: 2TB July
• 850 EVO: 4TB December

Source?

 

[jsmithepa]

Well I tell you what, if Seagate doesn't wise up, they will go the way of Kodak.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Samsung is manufacturing 2TB OEM solid state drives for Apple. The news reports indicated the 2TB OEM model is for an Apple / MAC tower pc that is being upgraded. Samsung has very lucrative contracts to supply OEM ssd's to computer companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and others. The OEM market has always been Samsung's top priority. That is where the revenue is. That is also part of the reason that Samsung has a 44% ssd market share. The consumer market was actually an afterthought. Samsung has consistently maintained the same manufacturing and distribution policy - OEM first, consumers second!

I think the Samsung reps at CES were partially correct when they indicated Samsung thought there might not be sufficient "consumer" interest. What the reps failed to mention is the problem of retail prices. Consumers simply aren't willing to pay enterprise prices for large capacity solid state drives. The EVO models which cost less have consistently outsold the PRO models by a fairly large margin. It also explains why low cost, entry level models are so popular. It is quite similar to what happens with video cards. There are numerous video card reviews featuring 2, 3, and 4-way SLI configurations. However, according to surveys about 95% of consumers, gamers, and enthusiasts have only one video card in their system. The cost for multiple gpu's is prohibitive for the vast majority of consumers.

Thanks to Samsung's research and development of 3D Nand, it will be possible to manufacture large capacity ssd's at lower prices. Most rumors and speculation indicate 4TB ssd's will be available by the end of this year and 8TB ssd's will be available by the end of next year. Last Friday an article was published by Information Week. The article indicated SanDisk is planning an 8TB ssd this year and a 16GB ssd next year. Samsung's 3D Nand allows for ssd capacities up to 32TB. Here is a link to the article:

http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-free-fall/a/d-id/1320958?

Samsung does not disclose a lot of information about future releases. I was only able to confirm two things so far. First, Samsung did contact partners and recalled the consumer retail versions of the SM951 that had already been shipped. The reason given was to do a firmware update prior to their release. Second, Samsung will be releasing multiple models this year. I have not been able to confirm model names or numbers. When I asked several sources whether the consumer retail version of the SM951 would be renamed 950 PRO the sources invoked their Non Disclosure Agreements with Samsung.

 

[hpmoon]

Samsung does not disclose a lot of information about future releases. I was only able to confirm two things so far. First, Samsung did contact partners and recalled the consumer retail versions of the SM951 that had already been shipped. The reason given was to do a firmware update prior to their release. Second, Samsung will be releasing multiple models this year. I have not been able to confirm model names or numbers. When I asked several sources whether the consumer retail version of the SM951 would be renamed 950 PRO the sources invoked their Non Disclosure Agreements with Samsung.

And here we are: Samsung 850 PRO 2TB SSD. Rather than just EVO, it's PRO. And, roughly the double the cost of 1TB, for double the capacity, is par for the course if not better than the usual pattern (such as Enterprise price gougers who so far surpassed the 1TB ceiling but want quite a lot more money). Good times ahead!

 

[JohnnyLucky]

WOW! That new drive costs a lot of money. Haven't come across any other vendors selling it. I'm wondering if the vendor ignored the NDA. The Samsung website has not added the 2TB capacity - yet.

 

[WaynePCman]

Samsung does not disclose a lot of information about future releases. I was only able to confirm two things so far. First, Samsung did contact partners and recalled the consumer retail versions of the SM951 that had already been shipped. The reason given was to do a firmware update prior to their release. Second, Samsung will be releasing multiple models this year. I have not been able to confirm model names or numbers. When I asked several sources whether the consumer retail version of the SM951 would be renamed 950 PRO the sources invoked their Non Disclosure Agreements with Samsung.

And here we are: Samsung 850 PRO 2TB SSD. Rather than just EVO, it's PRO. And, roughly the double the cost of 1TB, for double the capacity, is par for the course if not better than the usual pattern (such as Enterprise price gougers who so far surpassed the 1TB ceiling but want quite a lot more money). Good times ahead!

Link is broken.

 

[tasupi]

Samsung 2TB 850 Evo and Pro will be out in a few weeks. I know general pricing for the Evo will be $679.99. I forget the pricing on the Pro model.

 

[griffon9]

Samsung 2TB 850 Evo and Pro will be out in a few weeks. I know general pricing for the Evo will be $679.99. I forget the pricing on the Pro model.

Details?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

This morning Samsung released the 850 Pro 2TB and the 850 EVO 2TB models.

I already have the two new models listed in the ssd database I maintain. I also added links to the first technical reviews:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to the SATA 3 section and then down to the Samsung section. The 850 Pro 2TB and the B50 EVO 2TB have their own sections separate from the previous models. I did that because the new models have a new controller that should not be confused with the original models. Links to additional technical reviews will be added shortly after they are published.