Samsung 840 reliability

Jman · April 19, 2013

I have some extra money to spend that I will be using to back up one of my drives. I have two right now, the 840 that holds my games and my operating system. My other is a seagate barracuda which holds everything else such as documents, folders, pictures, and other things. I would really like to only spend the money to back up one of them. I am thinking of doing so with the seagate just because from what I infer is that hard drives fail more than ssds. I was just curious as to how reliable the 840 is an how confident can I be that it will be ok without a backup? Thanks

That Norwegian Guy · April 19, 2013

SSDs are not like HDDs in that, if they are "broken" or "worn out" (not really apt descriptors, but w/e) you can still read from them, you just can't write to them anymore. Samsung does have a 5 year warranty on them so they expect it to last 6-10 years. You should still backup your data, and two drives is better than one. If you have Windows 8, set up two 2TB drives as mirrored in Storage Spaces. Not true raid, but functionally the same. If you just want to backup every 2 weeks or something, get an external drive that you don't keep powered unless you're using it.

April 19, 2013

If you want backup, external is best - a RAID setup internally isn't a good way to backup data. It means that all your data is susseptable to things like viruses, hardware faults and failures, lighting ect. A sperate backup is always better.

GoodBytes · April 19, 2013

SSDs are not like HDDs in that' date=' if they are "broken" or "worn out" (not really apt descriptors, but w/e) you can still read from them, you just can't write to them anymore. Samsung does have a 5 year warranty on them so they expect it to last 6-10 years. You should still backup your data, and two drives is better than one. If you have Windows 8, set up two 2TB drives as mirrored in Storage Spaces. Not true raid, but functionally the same. If you just want to backup every 2 weeks or something, get an external drive that you don't keep powered unless you're using it.[/quote']
The 840 Pro has a 5 year warranty, like all synchronous MLC SSDs.

The 840 has a 3 year warranty, as it uses much cheaper TLC memory. While aynchronous MLC SSDs.have also 3 years, I would not trust Samsung 840 after 3 years.