I don’t have enough stuff to justify owning a 4TB solid-state drive, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one quite badly. All the 4TB drives on the market to date have been designed for use in data centers, and the performance (and price!) makes them unsuitable for sticking in your battlestation.
The latest addition to Samsung’s popular range of 850 SSDs changes all that. The new $1,500 4TB keeps the same performance specs as the smaller-capacity models, while granting you the ability to fit even the largest collection of rare anime onto one disk.
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Anandtech got a look at the new drive, and judging from the review, it’s exactly what you’d expect given the pedigree. Performance is in line with the rest of the 850 drives — not chart-topping read/write speeds, but they should be perfectly adequate for gaming and media editing work.
The only real let-down they spotted was the write endurance. SSDs degrade with every write of data to the drive, so manufacturers list ‘write endurance,’ the amount of data you can write to a drive before seeing significant performance drop-off. The 4TB drive only has 300TB of endurance, meaning that if you re-write the drive completely 75 times, it will slow down or die.
If you use your storage to store games and a media library, it will be years until you hit that limit. But if you use large drives for frequently storing and manipulating large amounts of data (raw camera footage, for example), you might want to look elsewhere.
