 We don't often do videos about SSDs anymore. I mean, look at them. I don't think Samsung has done anything visually interesting to their SSD lineup since they ever. So why would we make a video about the 850 Pro? Well, because we've got four of them. Ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha. Also, there's some really cool technology in them that I think is worth talking about. G.Skill's new RipJaws 4 series is their ultimate DDR4 memory with speeds of up to 3,333 megahertz available. Click now to learn more. No, but seriously, this video isn't meant to be so much a review as a behind-the-scenes look at what we're using for the storage for the server that hosts the linustechtips.com community forum and more importantly, why we made that choice. Now, a huge part of the story here is the NAND flash, the actual storage chips on the drives. The introduction of the 850 Pro marks the first retail availability of a drive using vertical or 3D NAND. This comes with a couple of significant benefits. So typically the way that flash and microprocessors get cheaper over time is that after significant research and expense, clever folks like Intel and Samsung move to smaller and smaller manufacturing processes to allow them to build the same device with less raw material or more advanced devices with the same amount of raw material, increasing performance and lowering overall costs in the long run. The problem with this is that for flash in particular, as it gets more and more dense, its performance drops and so does its endurance. The number of times it can be written to before it's not reliable anymore. So for several generations of SSDs, much of the performance and warranty improvement that we've seen has been from among other things, SSD manufacturers finding ways of using wear leveling to cleverly spread the load out across all the chips in a drive or even making the best use of limited flash performance with voodoo magic like on the fly data compression and decompression. But now here comes vertical man to the rescue. So by stacking layers, instead of spreading them out two dimensionally, Samsung can achieve the density and therefore capacity that they need, these are one terabyte drives we're using, while using a bigger manufacturing process. This ends up using nearly the same raw material in manufacturing, but gives back some of the performance and reliability that advanced SSD controllers have been compensating for over the last few years with the voodoo magic I mentioned before. Samsung then turns around and pairs this faster, more reliable flash with a modern advanced three core controller and up to a gig of low power DDR2 for cache and voila. The A50 Pro is about as fast as a SATA 3 SSD can be while being rated even at its lowest capacity to handle 40 gigs per day of writes for the entire duration of its 10 year warranty, which isn't nearly as impressive as the 128 gig drive Samsung says they've had in their lab for over 8,000 terabytes of writes and it just keeps going. And then I guess on top of that, you also get support for rapid, their SSD acceleration with sort of RAM cache thing that can be enabled through the SSD magician monitoring and tweaking utility, full drive encryption support and Samsung's easy to use cloning software. So all of that out of the way. What are we using these for? Well, right now in the server, we're running Western Digital RE Series enterprise grade hard drives for the form software and the database and we've discovered some interesting issues, especially when we launch giveaways and contests. In spite of CPU load being quite manageable, we've been getting some weird issues. Oops. Okay, I'm gonna put these boxes here where they'll be safe sort of back on topic. So we've discovered some interesting issues whenever we launch giveaways and contests. In spite of pretty manageable CPU load, we've been getting some weird issues with errors during account creation as people are rushing to make accounts and during these giveaways. And we narrowed that down to a storage performance limitation. So that is where the 850 Pros come in. Starting when these get deployed, the entire linustechtips.com site will be solid state based. We know that while unlike Samsung's enterprise grade solutions, these prosumer drives don't offer end to end data protection or power loss protection, but our system uses a battery backup to protect against unexpected shutdowns and having data loss due to that. So we're willing to risk using consumer grade hardware in order to get the raw performance and reliability that we'll get with 850 Pros, as well as the capacity and price that's sort of balancing all of those things. Now in the server, we'll be using our four drives responsibly. One will be for the operating system. Two will be for the database in a RAID 1 setup for protection from hardware failure. And a fourth will be a periodic manual copy from the RAID 1. So actually triple redundancy. But since we had Samsung send the drives to us to forward to the data center, we figured why not see exactly how much performance could be extracted from them if we decided to go crazy and build a four terabyte RAID 0 array. The answer is well over one gigabyte per second. And here's some crystal disc mark and AS SSD numbers for the SSD geeks out there. But one thing that disappointed me a little bit here, nothing to do with the drives, is that while they're capable of much more than this, it looks like Intel's onboard RAID controller is still a bottleneck for such a high throughput configuration even on X99. The good news is that for people running more reasonable two or three drive RAID 0 configs, Intel's RAID driver passes through the trim command to keep it running at peak efficiency. So aside from the reliability concerns of RAID 0, remember if one drive fails, all the array data is lost. It's a somewhat viable configuration for SSD users that allows them to overcome the bottleneck that is the SATA 3 interface until they bump up against the next bottleneck in the system at which point it might be time to go M.2 or SATA express or whatever else the case may be. Anyway, this was fun while it lasted, but it's time to send these to our forum house so we can start delivering you guys even better website performance. And if you haven't checked it out already, you guys should head over to linustechtips.com. We've got a great community over there discussing tech and gaming and all the stuff that goes on on the internet these days. Anyway, thank you for watching this video. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know how amazing one terabyte SSDs in RAID 0 are. I can rub my face on them or whatever it is people comment on YouTube videos. Check out the link in the video description if you wanna support us, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution or even just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. So whenever you buy a new SSD, we get a small kickback, it helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching. And as always, don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.