Samsung releases 120GB 850 SSD.

[Coaxialgamer]

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The latest entry level SSD from Samsung has no suffix and bears neither the PRO or EVO appellation. It is a new entry-level SATA SSD featuring Samsung's latest 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, making it a very close relative to the 850 EVO line.

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The SSD 850 120GB uses the same MGX controller as the 850 EVO, but with a newer generation of 3D NAND. The drive is intended to fill a gap that has existed in Samsung's retail product line since the 750 EVO was discontinued a little over a year ago, as it left Samsung with no 120GB-class retail SSD. So far, the SSD 850 120GB has only been officially released by Samsung's Chinese division, but it is available in other Asian markets including from some online retailers that will ship to us in North America. The release it seems will be staggered across regions.

The Samsung 750 EVO was a stopgap product, using 16nm planar TLC, while the 850 family transitioned from 32-layer to 48-layer 3D NAND. That transition for the 850 series doubled the capacity per die, from 128Gb to 256Gb. With half as many dies to use in parallel, the smallest capacities of the 850 PRO and EVO would no longer meet the same performance specifications. Changing components like this without renaming the product can be controversial, but Samsung took the reasonable route of discontinuing the 128GB 850 PRO and 120GB 850 EVO. It was their hope that the 120GB capacity class would be rendered mostly obsolete by the price/GB improvements enabled by denser 3D NAND.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12085/the-samsung-ssd-850-120gb-review

 

So a fairly uninteresting product, considering this is a budget SSD that won't be widely available in the west.

[mr moose]

Oh my god!  What will we do with all that space.

[suicidalfranco]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Oh my god!  What will we do with all that space.

 

Mind = Blown

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, suicidalfranco said:

 

Mind = Blown

And here was me thinking i might install windows.  

[Shadestones]

This would be great for my laptop. (I can't stand 5400 RPM) But it needs to be priced reasonably if they even want to release it in the US.

[vanished]

Samsung making a budget SSD seems like an odd move.  The 850 and other lines from them are very popular for a variety of reasons but price has never been one of them.  Even the mainstream 850 EVOs tend to be significantly more than other perfectly acceptable options, so it will be interesting to see if they can actually gain any ground in the budget space.

[Sfekke]

It might be interesting, but if it isn't available in the west .. it loses that tag immediately.

120GB's is decent for a normal user pairing it with a HDD.
My brother runs on a Samsung 120GB 840 Evo from 2012. It isn't much space, but games benefiting from higher drive speed are on there.
Garry's Mod coming to mind.

It still works after all this time and lets just say he writes to it a lot.

[RyanEsau]

Tech sure is moving... (Still kinda new to the scene)

 

I built my PC in September 2016 with a 6700K and GTX 1070. 6700K got superseded by the 7700K like 2-3 months later...

 

Now a little over a year later and we got a 8700K and a GTX 1070 Ti. 

 

Although I guess this SSD isn't really superseding my 850 Pro 128GB necessarily? My SSD is being discontinued though? Didn't except that, lol. Think I definitely will wait on my GPU for my build I'll hopefully be doing in January. Wait and see what might pop out from NVIDIA/AMD. Also think I'll wait on upgrading my RAM along with it. Wait for prices to return to normal or at least some kind of sale.

[Coaxialgamer]

7 minutes ago, Sfekke said:

It might be interesting, but if it isn't available in the west .. it loses that tag immediately.

120GB's is decent for a normal user pairing it with a HDD.
My brother runs on a Samsung 120GB 840 Evo from 2012. It isn't much space, but games benefiting from higher drive speed are on there.
Garry's Mod coming to mind.

It still works after all this time and lets just say he writes to it a lot.

It might be, who knows. It's unclear. 

Quote

So far, the SSD 850 120GB has only been officially released by Samsung's Chinese division, but it is available in other Asian markets including from some online retailers that will ship to us in North America

 

[Coaxialgamer]

9 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Samsung making a budget SSD seems like an odd move.  The 850 and other lines from them are very popular for a variety of reasons but price has never been one of them.  Even the mainstream 850 EVOs tend to be significantly more than other perfectly acceptable options, so it will be interesting to see if they can actually gain any ground in the budget space.

Well, Samsung officially discontinued the 850 evo/pro 120GB, so as far as Samsung ia concerned, those aren't an option anymore. This is more of a stopgap solution, as i guess people still want these kind of capacities? 

[vanished]

Just now, Coaxialgamer said:

Well, Samsung officially discontinued the 850 evo/pro 120GB, so as far as Samsung ia concerned, those aren't an option anymore. This is more of a stopgap solution, as i guess people still want these kind of capacities? 

For sure they do, but my concern is this space is already relatively well covered by other brands, and considering anyone looking at 120 GB is probably looking for the cheapest option (within reason), Samsung is probably not going to be able to make a compelling product since they're always well above the competition in my experience.

[mr moose]

50 minutes ago, Shadestones said:

This would be great for my laptop. (I can't stand 5400 RPM) But it needs to be priced reasonably if they even want to release it in the US.

 

I just dropped a WD green 240G ssd into an 8 year old laptop.  It now cold boots in less than 15 seconds. 

 

24 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

For sure they do, but my concern is this space is already relatively well covered by other brands, and considering anyone looking at 120 GB is probably looking for the cheapest option (within reason), Samsung is probably not going to be able to make a compelling product since they're always well above the competition in my experience.

 

Exactly, if you are looking at cheap ssd's you don't really care about read/write speeds as much as $/G.  Which is why I went for the 240G WD green for a laptop.

[Shadestones]

13 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I just dropped a WD green 240G ssd into an 8 year old laptop.  It now cold boots in less than 15 seconds. 

 

 

Exacctly, if you are looking at cheap ssd's you don;t really care about read/write speeds as much as $/G.  Which is why I went for the 240G WD green for a laptop.

When I was building my desktop, my main concern was read/write durability but not necessarily speed. Just anything faster than a HDD would do the trick.
It definitely helps that SSDs are way more common and cheaper than they were back when I was still using slow laptops and Win 7.
Couldn't be happier!

[iamdarkyoshi]

You guys may be laughing at the capacity, but for many companies (tesla included) reliable 120GB SSDs are ideal for use in like 95% of the computers there. The machines for example, they all need a boot drive for windows/linux/whatever

 

All the employee laptops too

 

Most stuff ends up on a network storage solution in big companies anyway.

 

Hell I'd buy 64GB SSDs for my own use if the price was really low, I've got plenty of machines here that are just internet surfers or they do everything through my fileserver

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

You guys may be laughing at the capacity, but for many companies (tesla included) reliable 120GB SSDs are ideal for use in like 95% of the computers there. The machines for example, they all need a boot drive for windows/linux/whatever

 

All the employee laptops too

 

Most stuff ends up on a network storage solution in big companies anyway.

 

Hell I'd buy 64GB SSDs for my own use if the price was really low, I've got plenty of machines here that are just internet surfers or they do everything through my fileserver

Agree, I in fact recently swapped out my laptop's 128GB SSD (830 IIRC) with a 60/64GB sandisk SSD that I had spare, it's running linux mostly anyway, but do have a windows partition for dual booting. If going away from home I usually take a USB HDD with me anyway, and while at home all data is saved to and read from my servers.

[jasonvp]

Somewhat tangentially related to this: I haven't been paying close attention to the SSD (SATA connected) tech for a while.  Is there anything on the horizon that would allow for a drop in price of the bigger drives?  Say the Samsung 4TB one, which is still around $1500US?  Do we expect larger consumer drives to appear soon?

[Taf the Ghost]

40 minutes ago, jasonvp said:

Somewhat tangentially related to this: I haven't been paying close attention to the SSD (SATA connected) tech for a while.  Is there anything on the horizon that would allow for a drop in price of the bigger drives?  Say the Samsung 4TB one, which is still around $1500US?  Do we expect larger consumer drives to appear soon?

Not for a few more years. They're dropping big money on building out flash production, but that isn't online for a while. 2019?

[jasonvp]

Just now, Taf the Ghost said:

Not for a few more years. They're dropping big money on building out flash production, but that isn't online for a while. 2019?

Well that just sucks.  The last noise-makers in my system are 2 4TB 7200RPM drives, striped into an 8TB volume.  I need the space and some amount of speed (more than a 5600RPM drive can give me), but what I don't need is the noise.  However, getting rid of the noise isn't worth $3K to me.

 

Dammit.

[Taf the Ghost]

Just now, jasonvp said:

Well that just sucks.  The last noise-makers in my system are 2 4TB 7200RPM drives, striped into an 8TB volume.  I need the space and some amount of speed (more than a 5600RPM drive can give me), but what I don't need is the noise.  However, getting rid of the noise isn't worth $3K to me.

 

Dammit.

Prices will come down over time, but spindles are here to stay. Just like that Tape Drives are *still* here. However, it's going to take time for prices to come down from that size, as it's not the most economical for a flash setup right now.

 

1 TB drives are creeping down, but multi-TB drives is going to be a while. Especially when you can now get 8+ TB spindle drives for reasonable prices.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

mmmnnn.

 

Wonder when would Micron trickle down their current Intel stuff over to Crucial ._.

NAND prices are expected to actually go up next year, though the big players are dropping huge amounts of money into building out new Fabs. 

[Matu20]

If only SSDs were cheaper, fuck NAND shortage.

[Misanthrope]

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Samsung making a budget SSD seems like an odd move.  The 850 and other lines from them are very popular for a variety of reasons but price has never been one of them.  Even the mainstream 850 EVOs tend to be significantly more than other perfectly acceptable options, so it will be interesting to see if they can actually gain any ground in the budget space.

I see it more as a bad omen: If even Samsung is introducing cheaper drives it means SSD prices will remain or get even more ridiculously inflated in the short term and they kinda know it and want to move at least some units.

[Coaxialgamer]

3 hours ago, jasonvp said:

Somewhat tangentially related to this: I haven't been paying close attention to the SSD (SATA connected) tech for a while.  Is there anything on the horizon that would allow for a drop in price of the bigger drives?  Say the Samsung 4TB one, which is still around $1500US?  Do we expect larger consumer drives to appear soon?

Samsung is banking heavily on 3D nand, with layer count increasing drastically. This stuff features 64 layers, while the OG 850 series used 32 layers. Effectively were getting 2x the storage per dollar. This will keep going. Industry is also looking toward QLC nand, which would allow them 4 bits per cell vs 3 in the TLC used here. 

[AGrider]

Isnt this just their OEM badgeless level product with a shiny new topcoat and actual samsung branding? 

[Coaxialgamer]

43 minutes ago, AGrider said:

Isnt this just their OEM badgeless level product with a shiny new topcoat and actual samsung branding? 

No. This is actually new tech.