Introduction

Despite what you may have read or heard, Samsung hasn't made any endurance claims regarding their new SSD grade triple-level cell (TLC) flash. A few numbers have been tossed around already, 1,000 and 1,500 program erase (P/E) cycles, but they didn't come from Samsung. The media, including myself guesstimated the numbers, but for all you know they could have been pulled out of a hat.

What makes the Samsung 840 a perfect target for our first endurance test is it's something different. We've had SLC and MLC NAND for years, but the 840 drive is the first consumer SSD in the wild with TLC.

(Image from Xtremesystems.org Forums)

Another interesting angle for this test comes from another test conducted at Xtremesystems.org. A forum member ran a similar endurance test on a Samsung 830 and, well as you can see in the graph above, it endured for a lot longer than anyone imagined.

So, we are pairing the unknown with the nearly unbelievable in an article series that will update you on the progress of one Samsung 840 - first boot till death!

We made a short video embedded above to document the start of the test.