07Jan Samsung 840 Solid State Drive $334
There seems to be an ebb and flow to SSD prices. For awhile prices were dropping and you could pick up 512GB ssd drives for as low as $285, but now the prices have spiked back up to around $400 for those same drives.
Samsung’s 840 series SSDs are currently clocking in at around $334 for 500GB which is around $100 less then the competition, but there is a reason for the price difference. The 840 series uses TLC (triple level cells) as apposed to MLC (multi level cells) or SLC (single level cells) which means two things. First, it can store more data with a smaller number of chips which decrease the price per unit. Second, it has higher read, program, and erase latency which puts it’s performance somewhere between generation two and the current generation of SSDs on the market.
The second issue shows up as a problem for random reads and writes, but for big sequential reads (which is the most common in video editing) tests still look very good. Even though the Samsung 840 isn’t going to be the fastest drive on the market for your operating system, it still looks like a pretty good value for an video editing scratch disk.
If you are in the market, you might want to check it out. Not sure how long the sale will last before prices float back up.
January 7th, 2013 at 12:59 pm
Would it work to have a SSD as a scratch disk, I’d be afraid that all of those random reads/writes would make the longevity (already really low since its an ssd) even shorter and make it fail sooner.
January 7th, 2013 at 6:27 pm
Longevity isn’t as big of an issue as you would think. Reads don’t reduce longevity, only write cycles and most of these drives are rated for between 1000 and 3000 write cycles per section of space on the drive. Even if you wrote 500 gb to the drive every single day of the year (which is very unlikely) and the drive failed at it’s minimum ratting of 1000 cycles (also unlikely) that would give you 3 years of service. If the rating is a minimum of 3000 you are talking close to 9 years at that same use rate.
I don’t know about you, but I general try change out or upgrade drives at least every 4 years.
January 8th, 2013 at 9:56 am
Ah, yeah didn’t know about that number of cycles they’re rated for. Does editing on an SSD speed up editing noticeably? I’ve never tried it, but it would be nice for it to be able to load the files almost instantly.
January 7th, 2013 at 10:11 pm
I hear that extreme heat can restore flash memory to a like new state. Can’t wait to see what kind of refurb kit will come out of that research.
January 8th, 2013 at 2:28 pm
I just put an OWC 3G drive into my 2009 Apple MBP to boot off of and a 7200 rpm 750 GB scratch disk in the optical bay and now it is really fast again!