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Re:Endurance experiment kills six consumer SSDs over 18 months by AceJohnny2 on Thursday March 12, 2015 @03:58PM (#9193404)
Did you even read the article? The 840 Pro was the top performer, reliability-wise.
Re:Endurance experiment kills six consumer SSDs over 18 months by sp332 on Thursday March 12, 2015 @04:59PM (#9193871)
Maybe they got lucky. They only tested one of each of these drives, and there was already a case (with the Kingston drives) where nearly identical models got wildly different lifetimes.

The low number of reallocated sectors suggests that the NAND deserves much of the credit. Like all semiconductors, flash memory chips produced by the same process—and even cut from the same wafer—can have slightly different characteristics. Just like some CPUs are particularly comfortable at higher clock speeds and voltages, some NAND is especially resistant to write-induced wear.

The second HyperX got lucky, in other words.

So it's definitely possible that the 840 Pro has reliability problems even though one of them won this test.

Re:Endurance experiment kills six consumer SSDs over 18 months by sevensor on Thursday March 12, 2015 @07:33PM (#9194743)
Thank you for this! Yours is the most astute comment I've seen here. As someone who's worked in flash memory manufacturing, I know how much variation is inherent in the process. It gets evened out somewhat by binning, but there's inevitable variation in dielectric thickness, aspect ratios, corner profiles, dopant diffusion, grain structure of polysilicon, and on and on, even discounting the density of particulate defects and watermarks.

Even if you don't know that, basic stats should tell you that testing a single unit from each manufacturer is going to be meaningless at best, misleading at worst.

Re:Endurance experiment kills six consumer SSDs over 18 months by vacri on Friday March 13, 2015 @12:11AM (#9195631)
testing a single unit from each manufacturer

Is less expensive than testing a dozen drives of each model, and better than testing no drives at all. It's not meaningless at all; it just has to be read with the right caveats.

Re:Endurance experiment kills six consumer SSDs over 18 months by vacri on Friday March 13, 2015 @12:08AM (#9195625)
The six drives included "Samsung's 840 Series 250GB, and Samsung's 840 Pro 256GB."

840 and 840 Pro are not the same drives.