The WAN Show: Samsung's 850 Pro 3D NAND SSD & NSA Sucks Again - July 4th, 2014

The WAN Show for July 4th, 2014 opens with the hosts acknowledging a busy period and a tight production schedule. They reference personal anecdotes about travel, downtime, and catching up on work, setting a casual, behind-the-scenes tone for the episode. The main topic of the show is Samsung’s new 850 Pro SSD, which introduces 3D NAND technology and promises improvements in reliability, endurance, and capacity. The hosts explain the context of the 840 Pro, noting that it remained a strong performer even as newer drives entered the market, and they discuss how the new 850 Pro seeks to outpace its predecessor. They highlight the 10-year warranty as a notable shift, presenting it as an aggressive but meaningful commitment that aims to boost consumer confidence in a premium product. A key point is that the 850 Pro uses 3D NAND, a stacking approach that allows higher capacities without sacrificing reliability, aided by a relaxed manufacturing class compared to traditional planar NAND. The discussion includes an analysis of endurance numbers, the theoretical versus real-world wear-out behavior, and a caveat about how endurance ratings should be interpreted in practice. They emphasize that even with high endurance estimates, real-world wear leveling and controller firmware play critical roles in lasting performance. The hosts also explain that, because the SATA interface is a bottleneck, the 850 Pro will be bound by the same iops ceilings that limit other SATA SSDs, regardless of 3D NAND advancements. They conclude this segment by noting the 850 Pro’s pricing stance relative to other premium drives and the expectation of future capacity growth as 3D NAND scales. The conversation then shifts to broader context around SSD adoption, acknowledging that while prices are coming down, full SSD-only systems are still not universal, with many users balancing large HDD caches for games and media. Throughout, the hosts balance technical depth with accessible explanations, translating manufacturing concepts into practical takeaways for builders and enthusiasts. They underscore the importance of reliability and warranty as decisive factors for professionals who rely on storage for long-term workloads. In their warranty analysis, they compare Samsung’s 10-year warranty to industry norms, discussing how warranties reflect confidence in longevity and what customers should realistically expect in the field. The 3D NAND explanation covers the shift from traditional two-dimensional scaling to a stacked approach, and the hosts provide a simple math-based intuition for why higher capacity drives tend to last longer on a per-TB basis. They also discuss the economics of NAND manufacturing, noting how increased capacity via 3D stacking can drive down per-gigabyte costs over time. The segment closes with a forward-looking note on how Samsung’s approach could influence other manufacturers to pursue similar endurance and capacity benefits, setting expectations for the next generation of SSDs. The show then branches into several lighter tech topics, including Tesla Model E speculation, Crytek UK staffing concerns, and the broader discussion about piracy, game demos, and the meaning of being a “gamer.” The Tesla Model E discussion envisions a future electric vehicle with cost targets, design tradeoffs, and potential battery-swapping strategies, while the Crytek UK segment considers studio layoffs and the broader implications for CryEngine support and game development pipelines. The piracy discussion returns to how demos, pricing, and consumer behavior intersect, with the hosts debating the role of demos in driving or deterring sales and how piracy is misinterpreted in some comment sections. They introduce a taxonomy of what constitutes a gamer, exploring different gaming behaviors from casual demo-driven play to deep, long-term engagement with titles and franchises. The 25 and 50 Gbps Ethernet standards topic appears, explained as a potential network upgrade path for data centers and enterprise environments rather than consumer desktops, with emphasis on the timeline and practical impact for end users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s NSA privacy letter is presented as a critical moment in the ongoing privacy debate, highlighting fingerprinting techniques used to correlate activity and undermine anonymization tools like Tor and tails. A broad conversation on national privacy rights follows, with opinions on the balance between security, privacy, and civil liberties, and a candid acknowledgment of national pride and its complexities in the 4th of July context. The discussion turns toward Windows 8 market reception, the Windows 9 preview, and Microsoft patent sharing, all framed as reflections on how operating systems and software ecosystems evolve in response to user feedback and competitive pressure. The show features multiple sponsor spots, including Squarespace and Five Four Club, interwoven with enthusiastic banter about the Fourth of July special offers and the quirks of live production. Toward the end, the hosts tease upcoming hardware reviews, notably Linus’ Razer Blade 14, including a teaser for an editor’s choice award that signals the team’s enthusiasm for the device’s design and performance. The episode concludes with a mix of practical hardware talk, speculative tech futurism, license to critique, and a playful, sometimes chaotic studio atmosphere that characterizes the WAN Show experience. The closing moments preview an after-show party and a giveaway, keeping the audience engaged and encouraging continued participation through questions, social media, and sponsor interactions. The overall tone remains a blend of sharp analysis, humor, and genuine curiosity about how technology shapes everyday life, from storage reliability to the future of personal computing and connectivity. The episode delivers concrete takeaways on the 850 Pro’s 3D NAND technology, warranty strategy, and the practical implications for builders and enthusiasts who weigh speed, endurance, and cost when upgrading storage. Finally, the show invites viewers to reflect on privacy and open internet principles in light of NSA-related developments, tying together the day’s tech news with broader societal questions about digital rights and personal autonomy.

Topics · technology · hardware · privacy · consumer_electronics