Bought a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD

I bought a new SSD. It's the recently released Samsung 850 Evo 500GB model. I bought it from a shop called "Pasokon Koubou"  (パソコン工房). It was spontaneous and you can read below how it went from idea to execution.

Last Friday while travelling back home from work, I received an email notification informing me that the prices of the Samsung 850 Evo SSDs had been slashed in Japan. I had them added to my watch list, not because I was in the market for a new SSD, but because I was a intrigued by how the falling Japanese Yen would affect prices of computer parts. Computer parts are the only thing that I feel spending money on: not food or clothing or leisure.

The price of the 500GB model had dropped to JPY 23,880. Indeed it is still a hefty price to pay for a drive, however considering how much the Yen had fallen, the price of this would amount to about $200, which is a really low price. Still, I wasn’t going to get it just because of the price.

In addition to that, I had to buy something before the end of the month. This is because, I had JPY 7,000 worth points attached to my Rakuten credit card and about JPY 2,900 of them were going to be expired at the end of the month. However to use those points, I had to buy something from the Rakuten store. Rakuten store is like the Japanese version of Amazon. Different shops sell their products through them and the payment handling and other things are handled by Rakuten. Unfortunately, you don't always great deals on Rakuten. But fortunately, many shops that have their own online store also sell through Rakuten.

I searched for the availability of the SSD on the Rakuten store. I managed to find it only JPY 10 more expensive than the cheapest price I mentioned before. That's good enough. In fact, it is even better because they were offering 2x the points with the SSD. Usually 1% of the amount we pay using the credit card is offered back to us in terms of points. In this case, we were going to get about JPY 478 worth of points.

Still I wasn't sure if I wanted to get it. I searched for reviews comparing the the 850 Evo 500GB drive with the 840 vanilla 250GB. I finally managed to find one on Tech Report and I was amazed by the charts. The 850 was mostly sitting at the top of every benchmark where as the 840 was sitting in the bottom. This could be attributable to the sub par write performance of the 840 because in the pure read tests the 840 was still competitive. Still, it felt like a decent investment as I was not only doubling the SSD capacity but also getting a faster drive – even if it is mostly on paper. Therefore, I finally decided to buy it.

So, now what will happen to the old drive? Should I sell it? I would not be able to make a decent return from it. It is in exceptional condition with only 11TB written to it throughout its lifespan. So I do not want to sell it for too cheap. I should probably keep it in my rig and use it for testing. Linux maybe? Or to try out unreliable software? You never know what you might need in an urgency.