Hello The 860 EVOs from samsung are good reliable SSDs, and if you grab one, the first thing you should do is to upgrade its firmware. But you can grab a crucial MX500 for less money and still have good reliability. They use NANDs made by micron that are very good! If you need an SSD that will be used as a main drive with hundred of GB written every day, the 860 PRO should be a better choice for you because they have much higher endurance and warranty.
It only needs AHCI available and enabled, even works nicely on my C2D T6400, which offers AHCI and Trimcheck showed the file location is indeed trimmed after deletion.
I remember on an asus laptop (e2200) it didn't work, it kept defragmenting, don't have the laptop here but, i trust your experience
My brother (& I) installed a Samsung 860 EVO SSD in his desktop PC. Running the Samsung Magician he received - No compatibility issue, BUT it said the SSD was Not Supported. After much research & jumping through many hoops... He uninstalled his Acronis backup software (which was causing restart problems anyway) & the SSD was Supported by Magician as it should of been. My brother is a bit of a backup fanatic & was impressed w/ how fast the Samsung Data Migration app. ran so he ordered 2 Samsung 250GB EVO's (& a USB 3.0 to SSD adapter) from B&H to do full system backups now to smaller but adequate SSDs.
The Samsung Magician also has some decent software too, you can get an option to set the over provisioning size yourself, Natively it's set for 10% but I set my 250gb drive for a little extra
Hello @M.J. - About three years ago, my brother bought a Samsung 850 EVO. He got the 500GB model and paid about $165 for it, so you'd be paying just $3 more for the 860 EVO and have double the capacity. An excellent deal in my opinion. Two things to keep in mind when setting it up are partition alignment and over provisioning. Before I installed Linux Mint for my brother, I sent an email to Samsung's customer support department asking what erase block size is used on the 850 EVO. The reply I got was "we can't tell you because this is proprietary information". That was a little disappointing, since the the amount of partition offset that is needed for correct partition alignment is based on the block size. What I did find out via Google was that the erase block size of Samsung's TLC NAND is 1536KB, not the 512KB, 1024KB, or 2048KB used in MLC NAND. So to be safe, and based on that info, I ended up using 6MB of partition offset to the first partition, since 6MB is an even multiple of 512, 1024, 1536, and 2048KB. You're not going to be able to do that when installing Windows, since it automatically sets the partition offset at 1MB, so I suggest using a tool like Gparted to set this up correctly, then install Windows. Years ago, I read a white paper published by Samsung, where they recommended using 7-10% of the drive's overall capacity for over provisioning. After you install Windows, it's just a matter of using Windows built in partitioning tool to shrink the Windows C:\ system partition accordingly, leaving the rest as unallocated disk space.
That Samsung 1T for $169 that's is a great price and they going to get cheaper by end of the year im going wait for Christmas and check it out newegg and see what price is.
I am using a Samsung Evo 850 250 GB for Linux and a Samsung Evo 860 1 TB for data. (Besides of those 2 an old 100 GB OCZ Vertex II). Both Samsung run well even on old SATA II chip sets such as Intel X58. Default alignment. AHCI would be no precondition for TRIM. If TRIM is supported depends on the controller FW and the OS. All those mentioned three SSDs support TRIM Recently the SSD controllers do have their own proprietary routines to maintain their NANDs. (Garbage collect / wear control) The meaning of TRIM isn't that important anymore. Also to align boundaries is of no advantage anymore at current SSDs. It's a controversial idea either way since erasable block size and page size haven't to be the same... I would use standard alignment and NO offset. Recent controller's maintenance routines are made to work properly with standard alignment and do not expect user's own offsets to deal with...besides of that you'd have to know the exact proprietary specifications therefore. Leaving back unallocated space (user over provisioning) is also not necessary since those SSDs do have own OP. Years ago, things were different and do not apply anymore. A SSD has become really carefree. Plugin, partitioning, formatting and go....the evo 860 is a good one.
A couple of weeks ago the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB & 250GB were on sale at FRY's Electronics. I did get 2 of the 500GB (I get 2 promo codes for these sales) to install in my family's laptops. *the prices definitely are dropping as I paid $139.99 (USD) for a 850 EVO 500GB last February.
Here we've discussed about alignment already: https://forums.mydigitallife.net/th...stalling-linux-mint.64920/page-2#post-1139452 Since I could not spot an advantage I have left it at default offset. And there are the 'unknown' proprietary specifications. Evo 840, 850 and 860 are probably different. 840 seems to have the mentioned 1536KiB. I don't have any info about 850 and 860, though. Maybe it also depends on total capacity of the particular model as well. I've learned it that way: "Read and program are aligned at page sizes (8KiB), only erase at block size." 1536/8 results to an integer either way. Once 192 of those 8KiB units (page size) have become unallocated in the file allocation table, the garbage collect operation can collect those, mark and erase them. Erase is the operation that takes (took) the most time. Since I got confused I have left anything at default. Maybe John has a direct comparison default offset to manual erasable block size alignment. If it's right what I have learned alignment at erasable block size has no impact on READ and WRITE/program. If...then only at ERASE operation. Since 192 is an integer it is doubtful, though.