I intend on buying the Samsung 850 Pro SSD, to use as an external drive via USB and I am wondering if it uses any kind of compression, like SandForce based SSD drives? I am fairly obsessive about data integrity, so I'm looking for an SSD that uses absolutely no compression on the data.
1 Answer
It's hard for us to say if it uses compression or not because we don't have access to the drives firmware, but that being said it's not very likely.
Typically compression is done at a file system level - not the drive level. It can be difficult for a drive to determine and organize what is repetitive data as it's not really equipped to analyze that data that's going in and out (there are exceptions, with certain drives). It requires a much bigger controller and dedicated memory.
A hard drives job is to store and retrieve what the OS wants. The OS can handle the specific application parameters.
Just as a side note, file system compression does not effect the integrity of your information. It might make small data loss worse, but when working correctly you don't lose any information.