Will samsung "rapid mode" extend the life of the SSD?

[ymcapc]

By using Rapid Mode on Samsung 850 Evo 120GB will it extend the life of the SSD?

 

[kanewolf]

It shouldn't change it much, if at all. The same data has to be written to the SSD otherwise you are a significant risk for data loss or file system corruption. Rapid mode could help a little by coalescing writes to be more efficient. I don't know if it does that.

 

[USAFRet]

By using Rapid Mode on Samsung 850 Evo 120GB will it extend the life of the SSD?

It will neither extend nor shorten the life of the drive.
It uses some RAM as a cache.

It also does not, in normal use, show any actual benefit.

I had it running for a while, with 2 different Samsung drives. 840 EVO 250GB and 850 EVO 500GB.
On...Off...I saw zero actual difference in daily use.

 

[wyliec2]

By using Rapid Mode on Samsung 850 Evo 120GB will it extend the life of the SSD?

It will neither extend nor shorten the life of the drive.
It uses some RAM as a cache.

It also does not, in normal use, show any actual benefit.

I had it running for a while, with 2 different Samsung drives. 840 EVO 250GB and 850 EVO 500GB.
On...Off...I saw zero actual difference in daily use.

I generally agree with this assessment - my primary PC has 2 M.2 Nvme and 2 850 EVO drives in it and all are Samsung.

Rapid Mode can only be used for a single SSD. Comparing large file transfers from the Nvme writing to the 850s it's very easy to see what Rapid Mode does - without Rapid Mode the transfer rate is pretty steady at 550 MB/s. With Rapid Mode the transfer will start at 1.5 GB/s for a while then throttle down to 0 - my presumption is the RM cache fills up and then the transfer slows and stops to allow the cache to catch up writing the data to the SSD. The actual process driving the transfer does not seem to see the transfer as complete until everything is written to the SSD.

Large file reads with/without RM pretty much stay at 550 MB/s in both cases - the data can't be read from SSD any faster than that.

My anecdotal thoughts on RM is that, like most cache, is beneficial with data that is reused such that it is in the RM cache when it needs to be read again - presuming that data fits in the cache size - I think RM uses 1 GB of RAM for this.

I think there are some hypothetical scenarios where RM may be beneficial.
* OS where there are some types of in/out type activity that fit the reuse case - I have a PC with the OS on an 850 Pro with RM turned on - in some cases it is very fast, 'snappy' response and 'feels' faster then my main PC with an Nvme OS device.
* I use a photo processing application where it stores several hundred MB of cache data comprised of photo files being used in the edit process. Again, this is very much a 'feel' and virtually impossible to quantify.

I don't think it makes any difference in the vast majority of situations..