Opinions on Samsung PM863

[Kneelbeforezod]

There's a couple of PM863s 480 gb available on Ebay for a low price. Is this a good enterprise SSD? Or better to get a Intel 3500?

 

[keybored]

PM863
You get higher TBW -- 700TBW vs. 275TBW for the Intel drive, and better performance.
Check this out: Conclusion - Samsung PM863 3D TLC V-NAND Enterprise SSD Review

 

[T_Minus]

The 863 line is the first samsung line up impressing me to be honest... they've appeared to have fixed their latency issue. Longevity... we'll we don't know yet but their consumer drives seem to 'last' their rating or better at-least.

 

[Patrick]

We use a lot of them for STH and DemoEval at this point.

 

[Kneelbeforezod]

So is $0.23 to $0.26 a gig a decent price for said drive? I'm looking at a new drive because i want to load up W10 for my dual westmere workstation.

 

[keybored]

I'm not sure if by "new" you mean brand new or just new to you. $0.23/GB is decent for a used PM863. The most recent eBay deal for it was at $0.20/GB. I doubt you'll find a brand new drive for $0.23/GB...

 

[Kneelbeforezod]

Yeah I mean a new to me drive. Both are used on ebay

 

[Larson]

So would the PM863 make a better primary (OS) drive for a workstation than an Intel DC s3500 or Samsung PM853T? Anybody?

 

[keybored]

So would the PM863 make a better primary (OS) drive for a workstation than an Intel DC s3500 or Samsung PM853T? Anybody?

Yes. PM863 uses newer, better 3D TLC NAND, has better endurance, and is faster.

 

[Larson]

Yes. PM863 uses newer, better 3D TLC NAND, has better endurance, and is faster.

Thank you. And how would you rate them compared to a Samsung SM863 or Intel DC S3710 - endurance, stability, speed?

 

[keybored]

SM863 and S3710 are both top of the line drives. Both will outperform PM863 in many aspects, but you will also pay more for them. Unless you have a very specific use case that demands ultimate performance and endurance, you may be better off sticking with less expensive options.

Good review of PM/SM863 here but there are others as well: Samsung SM863 SSD Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

 

[Larson]

Can anybody tell me what you should expect (benchmarks) out of PM863 480GB? I picked up a used one that HD Sentinel is reporting 98% health, 47.65TB lifetime writes, and 132 power on time. Samsung Magician is showing the resulting benchmarks ...

 

[keybored]

Sequential R/W numbers look low. I have a 960GB PM863 and sequentials are both close to or above 500MB/s. If I had to guess, you're probably running the drive on a SATA II port or maybe it's downshifting for some reason.

 

[Larson]

Sequential R/W numbers look low. I have a 960GB PM863 and sequentials are both close to or above 500MB/s. If I had to guess, you're probably running the drive on a SATA II port or maybe it's downshifting for some reason.

Absolutely right; I wasn't thinking of that - it IS connected to a SATA-II port. Thank you!

 

[Larson]

I'm getting ready to replace a Seagate ST500DM002-1BD14 500GB OS HDD in my primary workstation (Lenovo ThinkStation D20) with this PM863 480GB SSD, but it seems like I've had problems doing this in the past. My plan is to pull the HDD out, slave it and the SSD in another Windows 7 computer, boot from Acronis True Image WD Edition CD, and clone the HDD to the SSD. This always works great for other computers, but if I remember correctly I've had trouble getting the cloned drive to boot in my ThinkStation. It is using a Marvel 88SE63xx/64xx controller and the BIOS is configured to use RAID instead of AHCI; would this keep a cloned drive from booting? Can it not load the drivers? It seems I had this problem trying to replace other drives too (not OS drive). It's like the only drives that will work are the ones in there now. Or maybe I'm missing something in the POST message. Can anybody help?

 

[Deslok]

I'm getting ready to replace a Seagate ST500DM002-1BD14 500GB OS HDD in my primary workstation (Lenovo ThinkStation D20) with this PM863 480GB SSD, but it seems like I've had problems doing this in the past. My plan is to pull the HDD out, slave it and the SSD in another Windows 7 computer, boot from Acronis True Image WD Edition CD, and clone the HDD to the SSD. This always works great for other computers, but if I remember correctly I've had trouble getting the cloned drive to boot in my ThinkStation. It is using a Marvel 88SE63xx/64xx controller and the BIOS is configured to use RAID instead of AHCI; would this keep a cloned drive from booting? Can it not load the drivers? It seems I had this problem trying to replace other drives too (not OS drive). It's like the only drives that will work are the ones in there now. Or maybe I'm missing something in the POST message. Can anybody help?

that's a hell of a way to do that, I'd simply install both, use macrium reflect on a flashdrive to clone one to the other and then remove the HDD

 

[Larson]

that's a hell of a way to do that, I'd simply install both, use macrium reflect on a flashdrive to clone one to the other and then remove the HDD

Thanks Deslok! I guess for that matter, I could just boot from my CD and clone it in place. Any advantage to Macrium Reflect? Does it have a bootable version? Looks like the free version will do cloning, so that's good.

 

[Deslok]

Thanks Deslok! I guess for that matter, I could just boot from my CD and clone it in place. Any advantage to Macrium Reflect? Does it have a bootable version? Looks like the free version will do cloning, so that's good.

I like it better than arconis but that's subjective and if you use your d20 to build a boot flash drive it'll include any extra drivers(for raid controllers ect) it would need.

 

[Larson]

I like it better than arconis but that's subjective and if you use your d20 to build a boot flash drive it'll include any extra drivers(for raid controllers ect) it would need.

Ah-ha, which would answer the real question here (drivers). Can you use Macrium Reflect to create the boot flash drive, or are you talking about building a boot flash drive some other way?

 

[Deslok]

Ah-ha, which would answer the real question here (drivers). Can you use Macrium Reflect to create the boot flash drive, or are you talking about building a boot flash drive some other way?

It calls it recovery media but it can build it when it's installed on a system.