Bought another SSD for the Bobulator. This is a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro and it replaces the original 256GB Samsung 840 Pro from the first post as my OS drive. I'm still running a 512GB 840 Pro for my applications and a 1TB 840 Evo for my Steam games.
I really didn't neeeeed a new drive for my OS, but I really wanted an excuse to buy an 850 Pro. It is the very first consumer device to use three-dimensional integrate circuits. Up to this point, every circuit board has been two-dimensional, with all of the ICs sitting side-by-side on a flat plane. With three-dimensional ICs, two or more of these flat planes are sandwiched on top of each other. For NAND memory, this is known generically as 3D NAND, which Samsung is calling V-NAND (V for vertical).
This is a huge technological innovation. In the past, the number of ICs on a chip was limited by the size of the wafer and if you wanted more ICs, you needed to shrink the die size. We're below 20nm now and pushing for 15nm and smaller, but this is getting harder and harder. We won't be able to shrink much smaller than 5-6nm as we're starting to hit atomic boundaries. With three-dimensional integrated circuits, we can now stack several layers of circuits on top of each other, thus getting more circuits on a chip that occupies the same square area. Furthermore, manufacturers can actually step back to larger die sizes which are cheaper to build. The 850 Pro has a 40nm die size, which is roughly double the 22nm die size of the 840 Pro.
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures. There isn't much to see, as the package looks pretty much identical to the 840 Pro. I apologize for the potato quality of the pics, I took these with my crappy Blackberry.
The 840 Pro was already a screamer, but the 850 Pro is even faster. I was able to pull about 90,000 IOPS (4KB random read/write) with the 840 Pro, and I'm seeing about 102,000 IOPS with the 850 Pro. Although that's only about 13% faster, 12,000 additional IOPS is nothing to sneeze at. By comparison, a spinning disk can only push about 100 IOPS
total.
-b0b
(...can't way for 3D ICs in CPUs!)