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It's a slightly older model and it's SATA, but Microcenter currently has the Samsung 860 Evo 2TB for only $299. I snagged one for use as a games drive.

Nice price, but it will take a long time before I'll trust Samsung SSDs enough to touch one with someone else's barge pole.

The 840 series debacle was pretty bad, after all...

Topinio wrote:

Nice price, but it will take a long time before I'll trust Samsung SSDs enough to touch one with someone else's barge pole.

The 840 series debacle was pretty bad, after all...

Even if someone convinces me to trust the 860 Evo, I'm still boycotting Samsung. They had a run of high profile QA failures all within the span of a couple of years, and I prefer not to give my money to companies which are behaving badly. Maybe in another year or two I will forgive them if they don't screw up again.

perfect for Steam drive.

Meh. My 840 EVO is still chugging along swimmingly. Nothing mission critical on it, and it's working just fine.

If you want the best drives, and are willing to spend the money, the top tier Samsung drives are the way to go. Unless of course you want to go Optane, but that's another ball of wax that gets even more nuts for desktop use. I don't think the few boycotts are going to hurt them.

Good deal on a good drive IMO.

Nice. I just got my first 1TB for my X1X...doubt I'll ever need another one tbh.

I've come close sever times to buying a Samsung SSD, but never closed the deal. I've had good luck with PNY and Intel units, so that's what I've used mostly.

My main rig is using a Crucial SSD and it's pretty fast.

Most (all?) Crucial and some Intel ones have some power-loss protection using capacitors, most others do not. That alone is IMO a good enough reason to ignore other vendors' SSDs.

On Samsung specifically, some recent anecdata to ignore: I took my old 840 EVO out of the parts box and used it for a temporary deployment recently, with pre-deployment testing including using 'Samsung Magician' in a Windows environment and then under Linux running smartctl's long test. The drive passed all tests and then was fully written over, so no chance of stale data triggering the known issue. It errored in use on day 34 and again the next morning, at which point a replacement was procured -- but the Samsung still passes all tests I can throw at it ...

Topinio wrote:

It errored in use on day 34 and again the next morning, at which point a replacement was procured -- but the Samsung still passes all tests I can throw at it ...

Off topic, but I hate drives that still self-report that they're good and/or pass diagnostics even when they're not. Seagate HDDs are notorious for this; they can have thousands of bad sectors, and the SMART health status will still show as good.

just brew it! wrote:

Even if someone convinces me to trust the 860 Evo, I'm still boycotting Samsung. They had a run of high profile QA failures all within the span of a couple of years, and I prefer not to give my money to companies which are behaving badly. Maybe in another year or two I will forgive them if they don't screw up again.

I just recently bought my first couple Samsung SSDs since the 840/840Evo fiasco. FWIW, they lost about a dozen sales for my friends/family, mostly to Crucial.

Anyhow, the 860 Evo has been out for a bit and should be thoroughly vetted. It has slightly better speed and higher rated endurance than the MX500 (1200TBW vs 700TBW), plus it's the first to fall under $300 at 2TB.

I, on the other hand, usually run to samsung first, unless its optane which is amazing if you have the use cases that actually benefit. Its also retardedly overkill for gaming but load times ftw.

Have nearly half a PB of samsung 9xx series NVMe in arrays for a project elsewhere and we beat the hell out of those.

Crucial has been my "go to" SSD brand since the 840 Evo mess.

Meanwhile, I've had more Crucial SSDs fail than Samsungs in the past 3 years or so out of my personal and client SSDs. I still keep buying both. It's all luck of the draw.