Performance consistency wise, the MEX controller on the 1TB drive looks better than the MGX controller on the smaller drives. I guess this is the loss of a cpu core at work, but I figure there'll be no discernible difference to the user experience.
All in all, looks like a nice drive, a reasonable upgrade to the existing 840 evo drives. Just hope the V-NAND cost brings the whole price down to compelling levels as the process matures.
As for the Wear Leveling Count, it might actually be taking into account that a fixed portion of the installed NAND is used in SLC mode for the TurboWrite buffer. The 120GB model has 128GiB of NAND, of which 9 GiB are used for 3 GiB TurboWrite Buffer, so that makes 119 GiB of TLC capacity for both overprovisioning and user addressable space.
By the way, this also implies that because of TurboWrite these Samsung EVO SSDs (including the previous 840 EVO) have less overprovisioning space than most other SSDs.
>What I do know is that Samsung started the mass production of TLC V-NAND later, which suggests that the two aren't completely uniform. Moreover, from what I know TLC NAND requires some changes to the peripheral circuitry in order to read three bits from one cell, so while the NAND memory arrays could be alike the die size is still likely at least slightly different.
Is it possible, that samsung designed 2nd gen 3D with TLC in mind (eg requred peripheral circuitry) and simply set the controller in 850PRO to use 4 states instead of 8 (so MLC). I mean, it kinda makes sense to go this way, but not the other way around....
@Kristian Vättö Do you have any information from Samsung about whether the TurboWrite SLC buffer also helps decreasing the write amplification like on the SanDisk Ultra II with nCache 2.0?
Too bad that you couldn't get an answer in time. According to my observations from other people's drives, it really looks like the Turbowrite does help on that regard. Try checking out my thread on the Memory and Storage forum.
This phenomenon (write amplification just over or below 1.0x) is likely not going to show up during reviews or heavy usage since generally the drives get secure erased often and/or get hammered with writes which end up filling the Turbowrite SLC buffer.
It would be nice to have some older drives in the charts to get some perspective on whether a drive would make a good upgrade choice. For an upgrade the available space and the space/price ratio are probably the most important aspects but some features or a major speed increase might sweeten the deal even more. ;)
It's my anecdotal experience that all these awesome benchmark figures means absolutely nothing for the average user. Case in point I upgraded from an old 60GB corsair drive to an EVO840 which on paper is like twice as fast as the Corsair but in reality my user experience is exactly the same.
What version is the firmware of the 840 EVO? There is a notorious bug out there that'll drastically reduce the speed of the drive when it attempts to read data.
That's the bug about reading really old data. If he did an upgrade, then it wouldn't be really old data on the new drive.
It also doesn't apply to the point he was making - would I subjectively "feel" the difference if I upgrade to the 850 EVO from an older <insert_brand_here> SSD?
On one of these review sites, they mentioned that the step up from HDD to SSD is enormous, but between the different generations of SSD the difference isn't nearly as noticeable. Depending on the test, the difference between HDD and SSD is anywhere from 2.5x faster (ex. sequential write) to 140x faster (ex. random write). You definitely will not see such a marked improvement going from one SSD to another.
Also I agree with your point about the benchmarks being pointless for the average user. A lot of the benchmarks are geared towards enterprise usage. I think part of the problem is that the drives all behave pretty similarly (compared to HDD anyway), until they are pushed to the extremes. That's the only way for the reviews to differentiate between them, unless they find a particular weak point or flaw.
The performance profile of the drives and your workload will dictate if you notice the better performance. I would guess that you got a lot more GBs/$ when you picked up the Evo versus the Corsair drive. Also, not you don't need to struggle to get everything on to your boot drive. At the same time your computer may only startup 2 or 3 seconds faster.
They don't for an average user, but if you're here there's a good chance you're not an average user. And those fancy benchmark numbers cost you what?
There are real life workloads that will benefit for an average user. I have seen the consistency play out in my usage in various drives. I have seen garbage collection routines cause some painful performance issues in software encrypted drives.
In my opinion, the best reason to continue to upgrade, is capacity increases.
My first drive was 60GB, my second is 120GB, looks like my third is going to be 250GB....
No the speed difference isn't that drastic once you get off the HDD, but now you can start keeping more and more stuff on a drive at the same price point. All of my drives have been at the $150 point.. (Ok, so I had 3 different 60GB drives, but that was due to not realizing how bad OCZ suuuuuucked and I kept going back like a moron)
The other thing is that most SSDs now are limited by the SATA interface. And to be honest, unless you are running a database with thousands of queries per seconds, beating the SATA interface won't really add much to your experience. Larger capacities I think would be more useful.
Thats exactly what I always think when I read this reviews. Altough they are great to read, for someone who already has a SSD the gains are not noticeable. I have a Vertex 3 120Gb that I bought in 2011 and been questioning myself if I would se any real gains going to a 840 Evo, for instance, since they are much newer but you just answered my question ;)
I am in a similar situation. My first SSD was the ADATA's SP600@64GB running on SataII, I was so mesmerized by the speed of everything (boot time, installation, app run in time, ...). I really do take care of my Win installation, drivers, and apps, but in the end size was to small for boot+main drive in laptop. I bought Samsung 840 EVO@120GB, and in the recent times I thought I was going crazy, system was noticeably slowing down. I googled, and what do you now, problems, no more Samsung EVOs for me!! Buy Samsung 8x0 PRO or some other brand.
Your Intel SSD 730 prices are wrong. They might have gone up. The price of the ARC 100 is amazing ATM. It scores very good in the '2013 Storage Bench service time' which in my experience tells the most about how SSDs feel in actual usage.
They do seem a little low but we just got out of a major sale spree. During the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping fest the 480 GB Intel 730 was going for $200. I would have picked up one up myself at that price but they ran out of stock.
OCZ's firmware for the Barefoot3 series of chips the ARC100 uses has a less then stellar reputation. Things like unexpected power loss have been known to put it into a state of progressive corruption only recoverable by secure erase. There have been patches that claim to fix this on my Vector (that probably got applied to the ARC out the door), but I haven't seen anyone test if they're working.
It's because of TurboWrite. Iometer is a time based tool and the sequential tests are run for one minute, which means that the TurboWrite buffer will be filled and thus the performance goes down as data is written to the TLC array. AS-SSD, on the other hand, only writes a gigabyte of data so it all gets written to the fast SLC cache.
I saw the 840 EVO 500gb going for $180 over the black Friday - cyber Monday period. It'll interesting to see if Samsung keep the 840 EVO on the market as a the low end, so the 850 EVO can fill the mid-range portion of the market while the 850 Pro serves the high end.
$10 more than the 250GB 850 Evo and you can get a 480GB Crucial M500 or TWO Sandisk Ultra II's. Even though it's a year and a half old at this point, for most end users the speed difference is negligible but the doubled capacity is not. Like the article says, the pricing (at least the MSRP) seems to be in a weird place...
I don't usually run the 2013 suite on 120/128GB drives because it's more geared towards large and higher performance drives. Users with such heavy workloads shouldn't be buying small drives anyway for performance and capacity reasons.
Only by $10. That’s not really enough. I got the 480 GB Ultra II for $160 over black Friday, that’s $90 less than this sale on the 500GB 850 EVO. That was maybe an atypically good deal, but even at more regular discounts the Ultra II/MX100 is priced at about $180-$190, maybe $200, which is more like $50-$70 less than this “sale” price 850 EVO.
This review is right. Until the price comes down ~$50 per 500GB, I don’t see much reason for people buy the 850 EVO.
It's a SATA drive, so the interface will be SATA and not SATA Express/PCIe. Consequently, an M.2 variant will perform the same, since those variants would also be SATA driven, much like the older mSATA drives - same thing, different form factor, and unnecessary to review seperately.
I'm in complete agreement. I'm not going to buy another 2.5" SSD before I can get an 850 Pro (512 GB) equivalent with an M.2 interface. I have two motherboards with empty M.2 slots waiting for the market to catch up. I know about the XP941, but the pricing isn't great. M.2 drives should cost almost the same as a 2.5" drive...especially after eliminating the worthless metal/plastic box.
Seems to me like TLC will become the standard mainstream for 3D/VNAND, where as MLC will be pretty much only for high end/enterprise, somewhat like SLC was back in the day.
Last page, fifth paragraph, last line: "If I was" Should be: "If I were"
I know I'm a cunt for pointing it out, but I only do so because I generally think Anandtech offers fairly decently written articles, and I care too much about this sort of piss... Sorry.
How is data retention with this type of TLC NAND? Can the drive be powered off for a week or a month before data gets corrupted? While the drive is powered on, I assume there are refresh features for stale (a.k.a. infrequently accessed) data.
But in reality what are they going to be like? I don't think I'll buy another Samsung TLC drive after owning the 120 GB 840 EVO for the last while! It performs erratically, especially when resuming from hibernate. It can take anywhere from 10 secs to boot, up to 5 minutes, and I have applied the latest firmware and run the speed recovery app from Samsung. I have an mSata Crucial m500 240GB which is slower on paper, but in reality is much quicker and the performance is 100% consistent, it does the same thing, every time at the same speed!!
MLC all the way for me without any turbowrite nonsense, just straight forward advertised speeds across the whole drive all the time, without loosing data due to poor charge retention along the way!
Less nand equals slower performance, not more erratic performance. But it should perform at it's given speed consistentantly. I have over 30% of the drive free and 10% set as over provisioning on the 840 EVO. There is no excuse for a 5 minute boot time with an SSD. I don't trust these Samsung drives after my experience!
So I'm confused as its not very clear...Is Turbowrite turned on for all your benchmarks?
Is turbowrite needed to hit the the 540/520 read/write times? I saw the chart with TurboWrite on and off. So with turbowrite off this drive only gets 100mb/s ?
Turbowrite is a default feature. It is marketing speak for optimizations to increase write performance in write workloads. It can't be turned on or off.
Well, it has to be able to be turned on/off, as Kristian has a chart showing the difference in write speeds with it on/off. However, unlike "RAPID", there is no downside to leaving it on.
It's hard to understand why your SSD reviews fail to include Idle Power Consumption charts. For the hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power it would be far more useful if you included a chart for typical or average power consumed during Idle state.
"Hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power."
Woah... I don't know where you got that "hundreds of millions" number from, but any system that supports SATA is able to support Slumber. Slumber has been in the SATA spec since forever, and pretty much all 2.5" drives, and some 3.5" drives support this power state.
P.S. As an example, I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 sitting in my cubicle at work on an Asus PSE WS Pro motherboard. I have no Idea how old this thing is, but it's running a SATA-II 3.0 Gbps interface, and that great grandfather of a system supports HIPM+DIPM, and does Partial and Slumber on a variety of SSDs and HDDs.
Realworld: all modern ssds have similar windows boot and game loading time. All these synthetic tests are just for reviewers to have something talk about, and marketing purposes. Meh.
I would rather want a SSD that has 90% of a MX100 but only 50% dollar per GB, instead of extra performance that 99% of SSD buyers will not never benefit for more money.
My guess is that Samsung doesn't have the ability to produce very much V-NAND. So the 850 PRO, and now the 850 EVO, are priced to encourage most people to choose SSD's from the 840 line rather than the 850 line, preventing demand for the 850 line from exceeding the supply.
The absence of the Samsung 840 Pro from the Storage Bench 2013 section is pretty odd. Why wouldn't you include the previous generation's higher performing product? This is a little bit like publishing a GTX 970 review without including the GTX 780 for reference.
it doesn't make much sense to complain about the msrp when the drive is just now trickling to retailers. you're probably not gonna make a good deal on a 850 evo before christmas, but the prices will come down considerably in q1/q2 2015, they always do.
that said, i wouldn't mind paying a couple bucks more for a 850, compared to a 840, since it's just the all around better drive and it's lower power consumption alone makes it the better option for laptops.
pitted against an mx100 it might be a tougher sell, but let's just wait a bit for the prices to come down and give the early adopters some time to beta-test the firmware for us in the meantime.
Does TurboWrite, native encryption, and TRIM work in RAID 0 on the 850 EVO? Thats the only way i would invest $500+ into a SSD still bottlenecked by Sata 6
How do you conduct this review of a perfomance oriented SSD without discussing:
1. m.2 format (or lack thereof)? 2. PCIe 3.0 4x m.2 performance (vs SATA 6G)? 3. NVME m.2 performance (vs SATA 6G)?
It is the end of 2014, who seriously spends £320 on a 1TB performance SSD without considering the high-speed m.2 drives just around the corner, to which a growing number of enthusiasts have empty slots on their shiny new motherboards?
my mistake, i had presumed that the Pro was not a consumer part.
still, six months on with the arrival of tons of X99 and Z97 boards sporting m.2 slots, and the drives based on the marvell controller just months away, i'd have thought it would merit a mention.
But out of curiosity, what are you going to do with the extra performance? Who actually has any use specs higher than what the EVO already offers. It is certainly the case on some heavy load server but for end users, even enthusiasts like me, I am not sure I would get an even slightly better experience by beating the SATA 3 specs.
Well, it's not because it is invented that it is useful. It's like having dozen of cores in a CPU. Some applications will have some use for these cores (certainly relevant on servers or for virtualization). But the vast majority of common applications are single threaded so people should rather focus on higher clock rates. I'm always happy to see higher specs but I just wonder which of my application will be faster with M2.
Virtualization. I run VMware with several OS's running at the same time on my desktop. Being able to startup and have these run off a low latency disk is nice. Power users always have a need for high bandwidth, low latency I/O.
I'm unconvinced by Samsung. My SSD 830 is doing ok, having suffered an acceptable 30% performance decline (which may be correctable via secure erase but I will not test this).
But my 840 (non-EVO) which works in my HTPC and sees limited use outside of the hibernation file (60 of the drive is empty by the way) is now running more than 60-70% slower.
This is just unacceptable in a system which supports trim (win 7 x64). Samsung have done nothing to rectify this, claiming these problems occur on their EVO line. Until they change their approach, I'm inclined to distrust their latest cost-saving "innovation" and give my money to crucial instead.
Dear Mr. Vättö, while I don't think it would necessary belong into this article R3MF has a point. What is the state of SATAExpress, NGFF, m.2, ... currently? My laptop is 18 Month old and has an unuses m.2-slot witch, to my knowledge, nobody ever put an SSD into. You seem to have an ear to the ground when it comes to the SSD-Industry. There are a few questions you might have a qualified opinion about: - Will we be seeing current-gen (meaning 850 EVO-gen) m.2/SATAExpress SSDs? - If yes, up to wich capacity in wich form factor (2242, 2280, ...)? - with regards to m.2: Will there be mainly PCIe (2 lanes/4lanes) drives or SATA? - When do you suppose these will be an economically viable alternative to 2.5" given both slots are available?
In your personal opinion: - What is the point of SATAExpress when literally every SATAExpress-Device also has m.2? - Will there be a subjective improvement for the normal or enthusiast (non Datacenter) user with the switch to PCIe?
A quick blurb, perhaps in the form of a short pipeline aticle, would be much appreciated.
An other thing I always wondered about: While I am amazed with the percieved benefits of an SSD vs. an HDD game-load-times often seem not to change at all. It's more of an oddity than a real concern but my new system (i5 4200, 8GB, 840 EVO) often has the same load times than my old system (i3 330, 4GB, HDD). I always thought load times were mainly dependent on how fast the data can be read (HDD/SDD bound) and how fast it can be processed/extracted (CPU bound). Is there a factor I'm missing or do games just not take advantage of certain kinds of faster hardware.
Perhaps you or some of the other readers can help me with my curiosity.
I can't answer all of your questions, but I can answer the gaming part.
With regards to gaming, it really depends on the game. Many games these days are relatively optimized on loading, so running them on an HDD or SSD doesn't matter too much since they like to load parts of the game in the background. However, there are some games where having an SSD is completely noticeable. As an avid World of Warcraft player, I can tell which raid members have SSDs and which don't because those of us with SSDs simply appear in the raid much faster than those on HDDs when switching zones. I mean, it definitely doesn't hinder gameplay too much since the only thing that takes a while is actually getting into the zone. The rest of the zone is in RAM already, so getting to and fighting bosses are instantaneous. I used to have a 7200 RPM drive before too. For me, the difference is completely noticeable now that I have had an SSD for a couple of years now.
Sorry for taking a while to respond -- I had to focus on my finals after I got the review done, so I couldn't catch up with all the comments until now.
The 850 EVO is still a SATA 6Gbps design, so there won't be a SATA Express version of it. There may (and likely will) be an M.2 version coming, although that would also be limited to SATA 6Gbps since M.2 can support both SATA and PCIe interfaces. As for the form factors and capacities, it's impossible to say for sure but technically the 2242 form factor could max out at 512GB and the 2280 at 2TB (assuming double-sided PCB and 16x128Gbit dies per package).
However, the SM951/PM951 will be available sometime next year, although it will be limited to OEM channels again (RamCity saves you, again). That's the PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe M.2 drive with 3D NAND (SM=MLC, PM=TLC). I don't have any further details at this point, unfortunately.
Regarding other PCIe SSDs, I should know more after CES when I meet with all the companies again and get an update on their schedules, but for now it looks like most designs are aiming at mid-2015 launch.
850 Pros are my last Samsung SSD products to buy. For the upcoming X99 extreme workstations, I'll to go with:
1) SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB (today $490 vs $600 of 850 Pro). The performance of both SSDs are comparable. 2) Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe 960GB PCI-E SSD: this one decimates all the best SSDs. 3) Intel SSD DC P3700 800GB and 1.6TB models: The King
This is the problem with Samsung. When they first came into the market, they blew the competition away with incredible performance, reliability, and pricing.
The 840 came with TLC, promising superior pricing with good performance, but in fact pricing was out of whack, putting it way above the 830 that had just left the market. Then 840 Pro took over the high end where only fools dare to tread.
The 850 line (Pro and EVO) raise the prices even higher. It's like Samsung thinks they're the Apple of SSD's and can do whatever they want in pricing. To hell with the competition, people will pay whatever they say.
It's a shame. Way back, I got an 830 because it was a great value. This time around? I waited until Black Friday and picked up a Sandisk after waiting a couple of years for Samsung to remove their head from out of their butt. My 480GB Extreme Pro only cost me $185 and it will last me a good long while.
That could have been you, Samsung. I didn't want to put another brand SSD in my machine. I wanted to have only one Samsung Magician. But Samsung pricing is completely absurd.
They acting like Intel with does Xeon chips, except, Samsung actually has other competition with SSD's. Like you, with my next SSD purchase, I will have to look at other companies as Samsung's $/GB vs the competition has continued to get worse.
I would like a 1.2th ssd that is really 1.5tb with extra provisioning. I would like it to have good 4k random read writes more then anything.
I have 2 1tb ssds and use them for mac minis.
I use external thunderbolt drives and boot with the 1 tb ssd's the drive in the mini is merely a back up for me. I find I could use a little bigger then 1tb for the video recording I do. Still waiting for a bigger ssd.
Didn't take long for the MSRP to drop. Was on sale at Newegg and I just bought a 250GB 850 EVO for $114 shipped.
Although I previously, purchased two Crucial 256GB MX100s, to use in a couple of older laptops, which installed and continue to run flawlessly, wanted to upgrade the HDD in a new laptop.
Was really conflicted in not buying another MX100, but the better performance specification and 5 year warranty won out.
Has anyone seen info for the write-block and erase-block sizes for the 1TB 850 Pro? I am intending to RAID 4 of them together, and I want to make sure that my RAID's stride-size is a multiple of the larger of those two values. If they are both something small like 4KiB, then pretty much any larger Pow2 value I choose will be fine. But my only other SSD purchase (OCZ Vertex 4) had a WBS of 8KiB and an EBS of 2MiB. In that case, if I'm going to be writing large files to my RAID, then I think it's useful to know that the EBS is so large, so that I can set my RAID stride-size accordingly. Samsung's "data sheet" for the 850 Pro series neglects to give this information... however, I do note that they only quote random-write performance in terms of 4KB transfers, which may imply that at least their WBS is 4KiB. I just wish I knew for certain, and also the EBS ?
Hi, i own 2 of the 120GB Samsung EVO 850. Should I put them in RAID 0 or leave them as separate drives? It seems that Samsung Magician works only when drives are not in RAID mode. Also, RAPID mode works only on one drive and when not in RAID.
Sorry for the probably dumb question, but isn't the way turbowrite works detrimental for the ssd longevity? If I understood correctly, (almost) ALL the writes are going to pass through the same "x" GB slc buffer. Isn't that partition going to "wear out" son enough?
Samsung SSD 850 Evo is a life-changer for anyone who uses it. With the sleek and beautiful build quality, Evo 850 does obviously come with a great price tag.
There are of course different capacities of the given product, but I preferred to use the 120 GB version, largely due to the relatively low price and my actual need of owning an SSD.
My major requirement was to install the Operating System and few other mostly used applications inside the SSD, so that the whole computer looks so fast. Samsung Evo 850 120 GB SSD has done the job fantastically for me so far and I highly recommend this product to everyone.
Out of the sellers online, GearBest seems to offer the best package since GB is a trusted source of products. They are offering a flash sale at the moment and you may try it to get it for a relatively a low price.
Samsung OWNS the SSD market! When I can buy an 850 EVO 500 GB model for just $110 and get for all intents and purposes, the BEST possible speed from a SATA 6 drive - there is REALLY NO POINT in buying ANY other brand!
I mean the 850 EVO keeps up with, and sometimes even SURPASSES the 850 PRO - often in ways that will benefit the average power user/gamer more!
I wonder how much of that is due to the 6 GB of SLC write cache - as the 850 PRO series has no SLC NAND whatsoever!
Also, once the "Magical" storage capacity of 480 GB and above is reached, again, for JUST $110 - not only is that more than sufficient to hold my OS and all the games I play, but all SSDs tend to perform best at 480 GB and above, I would say for the 850 EVO series, this is DOUBLY TRUE! Due to the fact that the 500 GB model has a full 6 GB of SLC Turbo-write NAND (compared to 3 for the 250 and 120) - but it also has a full 512 MB of DDR3L on it!
I dunno why Anandtech has it listed as DDR2L memory, but it is indeed DDR3L RAM on ALL Samsung 850 series drives!
Hi Hardware Community, I know this article is quite outdated right now, nevertheless the actual topic of the authors "Final Words" bug me right now. Especially now that enough time for longtime-endurance tests has passed.
Anyway, I can´t choose between the Samsung EVO 850 1TB v2 (289€) and die SanDisk Extreme 960GB (281€). So pricewise the "Pro" is even cheaper right now compared to the Samsung. But there are some obvious differences:
- TLC 3D V-NAND vs. MLC Planar - 5 years vs. 10 years warranty - 150 TBW vs. 80 TBW - higher Peak vs. consistency - Samsung Bugging vs. sudden death drives
My usage: - Client for everything: gaming, programming, office, multimedia - averything - gonna split it in system and data-partition - gonne be in laptop that´s used as desktop - battery is wasted, so no concern about power consumption
So, usually I use hardware until it´s broken so meaning about 8-10 years. Still I want steady performance without sudden decline in speed like with the EVO 840 :C I´d be really glad, if you could tell me your opinion on this :)
but couldn't find one. My mom has an aging Dell D830, which is very slow and I'm looking for a reasonably priced replacement, and I think this driver is great.
Yes this is a older review but just posting in 2020 on how my Samsung 850 EVO 500Gb has stood up to the wear & tear of every day computing. I have had my drive since 2015 in a computer that is on for many hours a day since I got the drive.
The system gets used a lot so everything gets a really nice work out everyday. According to the Samsung software my drive is only at 2% of it's rated endurance lifespan. Not to bad for a drive that gets hit pretty hard everyday with reads and writes and to still have 98% life endurance left after all these years of use.
I read this review back in 2014 and it was one of the reasons I decided to get this drive for my system. I just came from a new write up form this site talking about a Midrive setup. What got me thinking about TLC nand was not the write up itself but a comment from a user and how they were saying just how bad QLC & TLC nand was and how they had low endurance lifespans.
Am I missing something here? My drive has TLC 3D V-nand made by Samsung and the drive is still at 98% endurance left on the SSD. Is Samsung's 3D V-nand better than regular TLC chips and lasts longer because of it. Yes my drive is getting up there in age and I plan on replacing it once I do a full system update and I will be getting a much faster NVMe PCI-e 4.0 drive.
As for the Samsung SSD I probably will use it to cache my 4 4TB hard drives since AMD has that caching setup in their platform and I can still find a good use for the Sata SSD I currently have. For now it is very snappy and the system feels very fast still with things such as Chrome or Firefox opening in half a second or Windows still booting up in a mere 7 seconds right after the bios post screen to the desktop so not worried about speed just quite yet.
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TheWrongChristian - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Performance consistency wise, the MEX controller on the 1TB drive looks better than the MGX controller on the smaller drives. I guess this is the loss of a cpu core at work, but I figure there'll be no discernible difference to the user experience.All in all, looks like a nice drive, a reasonable upgrade to the existing 840 evo drives. Just hope the V-NAND cost brings the whole price down to compelling levels as the process matures.
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
As for the Wear Leveling Count, it might actually be taking into account that a fixed portion of the installed NAND is used in SLC mode for the TurboWrite buffer. The 120GB model has 128GiB of NAND, of which 9 GiB are used for 3 GiB TurboWrite Buffer, so that makes 119 GiB of TLC capacity for both overprovisioning and user addressable space.By the way, this also implies that because of TurboWrite these Samsung EVO SSDs (including the previous 840 EVO) have less overprovisioning space than most other SSDs.
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Yikes! This was not meant to be in response to TheWrongChristian.hojnikb - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
>What I do know is that Samsung started the mass production of TLC V-NAND later, which suggests that the two aren't completely uniform. Moreover, from what I know TLC NAND requires some changes to the peripheral circuitry in order to read three bits from one cell, so while the NAND memory arrays could be alike the die size is still likely at least slightly different.Is it possible, that samsung designed 2nd gen 3D with TLC in mind (eg requred peripheral circuitry) and simply set the controller in 850PRO to use 4 states instead of 8 (so MLC). I mean, it kinda makes sense to go this way, but not the other way around....
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
@Kristian VättöDo you have any information from Samsung about whether the TurboWrite SLC buffer also helps decreasing the write amplification like on the SanDisk Ultra II with nCache 2.0?
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Unfortunately I don't. It was among the questions I sent but unfortunately Samsung couldn't get any of my questions answered on time for the review.Solid State Brain - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Too bad that you couldn't get an answer in time. According to my observations from other people's drives, it really looks like the Turbowrite does help on that regard. Try checking out my thread on the Memory and Storage forum.This phenomenon (write amplification just over or below 1.0x) is likely not going to show up during reviews or heavy usage since generally the drives get secure erased often and/or get hammered with writes which end up filling the Turbowrite SLC buffer.
Daniel Egger - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It would be nice to have some older drives in the charts to get some perspective on whether a drive would make a good upgrade choice. For an upgrade the available space and the space/price ratio are probably the most important aspects but some features or a major speed increase might sweeten the deal even more. ;)sheh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Not perfect of always complete, but usable:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
Kvaern - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's my anecdotal experience that all these awesome benchmark figures means absolutely nothing for the average user.Case in point I upgraded from an old 60GB corsair drive to an EVO840 which on paper is like twice as fast as the Corsair but in reality my user experience is exactly the same.
Kevin G - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
What version is the firmware of the 840 EVO? There is a notorious bug out there that'll drastically reduce the speed of the drive when it attempts to read data.See:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-release...
romrunning - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
That's the bug about reading really old data. If he did an upgrade, then it wouldn't be really old data on the new drive.It also doesn't apply to the point he was making - would I subjectively "feel" the difference if I upgrade to the 850 EVO from an older <insert_brand_here> SSD?
doggghouse - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
On one of these review sites, they mentioned that the step up from HDD to SSD is enormous, but between the different generations of SSD the difference isn't nearly as noticeable. Depending on the test, the difference between HDD and SSD is anywhere from 2.5x faster (ex. sequential write) to 140x faster (ex. random write). You definitely will not see such a marked improvement going from one SSD to another.Also I agree with your point about the benchmarks being pointless for the average user. A lot of the benchmarks are geared towards enterprise usage. I think part of the problem is that the drives all behave pretty similarly (compared to HDD anyway), until they are pushed to the extremes. That's the only way for the reviews to differentiate between them, unless they find a particular weak point or flaw.
eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
The performance profile of the drives and your workload will dictate if you notice the better performance. I would guess that you got a lot more GBs/$ when you picked up the Evo versus the Corsair drive. Also, not you don't need to struggle to get everything on to your boot drive. At the same time your computer may only startup 2 or 3 seconds faster.They don't for an average user, but if you're here there's a good chance you're not an average user. And those fancy benchmark numbers cost you what?
There are real life workloads that will benefit for an average user. I have seen the consistency play out in my usage in various drives. I have seen garbage collection routines cause some painful performance issues in software encrypted drives.
MrSpadge - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
With a half-decent SSD your I/O is probalby mostly CPU-limited in the real world anyway.ummduh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
In my opinion, the best reason to continue to upgrade, is capacity increases.My first drive was 60GB, my second is 120GB, looks like my third is going to be 250GB....
No the speed difference isn't that drastic once you get off the HDD, but now you can start keeping more and more stuff on a drive at the same price point. All of my drives have been at the $150 point.. (Ok, so I had 3 different 60GB drives, but that was due to not realizing how bad OCZ suuuuuucked and I kept going back like a moron)
cm2187 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
The other thing is that most SSDs now are limited by the SATA interface. And to be honest, unless you are running a database with thousands of queries per seconds, beating the SATA interface won't really add much to your experience. Larger capacities I think would be more useful.Badelhas - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Thats exactly what I always think when I read this reviews. Altough they are great to read, for someone who already has a SSD the gains are not noticeable. I have a Vertex 3 120Gb that I bought in 2011 and been questioning myself if I would se any real gains going to a 840 Evo, for instance, since they are much newer but you just answered my question ;)matej_eu - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I am in a similar situation. My first SSD was the ADATA's SP600@64GB running on SataII, I was so mesmerized by the speed of everything (boot time, installation, app run in time, ...). I really do take care of my Win installation, drivers, and apps, but in the end size was to small for boot+main drive in laptop. I bought Samsung 840 EVO@120GB, and in the recent times I thought I was going crazy, system was noticeably slowing down. I googled, and what do you now, problems, no more Samsung EVOs for me!! Buy Samsung 8x0 PRO or some other brand.milli - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Your Intel SSD 730 prices are wrong. They might have gone up.The price of the ARC 100 is amazing ATM. It scores very good in the '2013 Storage Bench service time' which in my experience tells the most about how SSDs feel in actual usage.
Kevin G - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
They do seem a little low but we just got out of a major sale spree. During the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping fest the 480 GB Intel 730 was going for $200. I would have picked up one up myself at that price but they ran out of stock.HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
You'd have been better served with the Sandisk Extreme Pro 480GB for $185.davolfman - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
OCZ's firmware for the Barefoot3 series of chips the ARC100 uses has a less then stellar reputation. Things like unexpected power loss have been known to put it into a state of progressive corruption only recoverable by secure erase. There have been patches that claim to fix this on my Vector (that probably got applied to the ARC out the door), but I haven't seen anyone test if they're working.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
Up to its old tricks, then.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
As listed on the table, the prices were taken on December 7 and were accurate at the time.sheh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Can anyone explain the large discrepancy (not only in this case) in sequential speed between Iometer and AS-SSD?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
It's because of TurboWrite. Iometer is a time based tool and the sequential tests are run for one minute, which means that the TurboWrite buffer will be filled and thus the performance goes down as data is written to the TLC array. AS-SSD, on the other hand, only writes a gigabyte of data so it all gets written to the fast SLC cache.sheh - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Thanks. I'll have to reread older reviews, but I think there's a similar behavior also on other drives that do not have a fast temporary buffer?maecenas - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I saw the 840 EVO 500gb going for $180 over the black Friday - cyber Monday period. It'll interesting to see if Samsung keep the 840 EVO on the market as a the low end, so the 850 EVO can fill the mid-range portion of the market while the 850 Pro serves the high end.Laststop311 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Prices are kinda crappy. Why go with an 850 evo when u can spend 20-30 dollars more and get an 850 pro?hojnikb - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Or 50$ less and get a mx100/ultra IIapoe - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
$10 more than the 250GB 850 Evo and you can get a 480GB Crucial M500 or TWO Sandisk Ultra II's. Even though it's a year and a half old at this point, for most end users the speed difference is negligible but the doubled capacity is not. Like the article says, the pricing (at least the MSRP) seems to be in a weird place...HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Samsung thinks they're Apple.In SSD's.
alacard - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
thanks for the review. is it my imagination or is the 120gb model missing from the destroyer benchmark?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I don't usually run the 2013 suite on 120/128GB drives because it's more geared towards large and higher performance drives. Users with such heavy workloads shouldn't be buying small drives anyway for performance and capacity reasons.Memristor - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Regarding the price, newegg.com already offers them below the suggested retail price. See here:http://promotions.newegg.com/samsung/14-6480/index...
wallysb01 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Only by $10. That’s not really enough. I got the 480 GB Ultra II for $160 over black Friday, that’s $90 less than this sale on the 500GB 850 EVO. That was maybe an atypically good deal, but even at more regular discounts the Ultra II/MX100 is priced at about $180-$190, maybe $200, which is more like $50-$70 less than this “sale” price 850 EVO.This review is right. Until the price comes down ~$50 per 500GB, I don’t see much reason for people buy the 850 EVO.
fokka - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
comparing msrp to a black friday deal doesn't make sense.Luscious - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Where's the m.2 version?And if Samsung is stubbornly sticking with 2.5 inch drives, why no Sata Express version?
The hardware for both is out there, and has been for some time.
ZeDestructor - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's a SATA drive, so the interface will be SATA and not SATA Express/PCIe. Consequently, an M.2 variant will perform the same, since those variants would also be SATA driven, much like the older mSATA drives - same thing, different form factor, and unnecessary to review seperately.TEAMSWITCHER - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I'm in complete agreement. I'm not going to buy another 2.5" SSD before I can get an 850 Pro (512 GB) equivalent with an M.2 interface. I have two motherboards with empty M.2 slots waiting for the market to catch up. I know about the XP941, but the pricing isn't great. M.2 drives should cost almost the same as a 2.5" drive...especially after eliminating the worthless metal/plastic box.extide - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Seems to me like TLC will become the standard mainstream for 3D/VNAND, where as MLC will be pretty much only for high end/enterprise, somewhat like SLC was back in the day.MadDuffy - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Newegg prices (USD) are up:120 GB - 90
250 GB - 140
500 GB - 250
1 TB - 470
Email I received indicates these are promotional prices available through Dec 14th
casperes1996 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Last page, fifth paragraph, last line:"If I was"
Should be: "If I were"
I know I'm a cunt for pointing it out, but I only do so because I generally think Anandtech offers fairly decently written articles, and I care too much about this sort of piss...
Sorry.
apudapus - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
How is data retention with this type of TLC NAND? Can the drive be powered off for a week or a month before data gets corrupted? While the drive is powered on, I assume there are refresh features for stale (a.k.a. infrequently accessed) data.hojnikb - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
If its up to jedec (i imagine it is) then its good for atleast a year.kgh00007 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
But in reality what are they going to be like? I don't think I'll buy another Samsung TLC drive after owning the 120 GB 840 EVO for the last while! It performs erratically, especially when resuming from hibernate. It can take anywhere from 10 secs to boot, up to 5 minutes, and I have applied the latest firmware and run the speed recovery app from Samsung. I have an mSata Crucial m500 240GB which is slower on paper, but in reality is much quicker and the performance is 100% consistent, it does the same thing, every time at the same speed!!MLC all the way for me without any turbowrite nonsense, just straight forward advertised speeds across the whole drive all the time, without loosing data due to poor charge retention along the way!
Lolimaster - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Your EVO is 120 and your other drive is 240, less nand, more erratic, simple. Look at the chart, you get consistent writes/read with 500-1TB models.kgh00007 - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Less nand equals slower performance, not more erratic performance. But it should perform at it's given speed consistentantly. I have over 30% of the drive free and 10% set as over provisioning on the 840 EVO. There is no excuse for a 5 minute boot time with an SSD. I don't trust these Samsung drives after my experience!mlkmade - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
So I'm confused as its not very clear...Is Turbowrite turned on for all your benchmarks?Is turbowrite needed to hit the the 540/520 read/write times? I saw the chart with TurboWrite on and off. So with turbowrite off this drive only gets 100mb/s ?
This article is very vague in regards to that.
eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Turbowrite is a default feature. It is marketing speak for optimizations to increase write performance in write workloads. It can't be turned on or off.erple2 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Well, it has to be able to be turned on/off, as Kristian has a chart showing the difference in write speeds with it on/off. However, unlike "RAPID", there is no downside to leaving it on.geniekid - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Well written conclusion.andrewbaggins - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's hard to understand why your SSD reviews fail to include Idle Power Consumption charts. For the hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power it would be far more useful if you included a chart for typical or average power consumed during Idle state.metayoshi - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
"Hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power."Woah... I don't know where you got that "hundreds of millions" number from, but any system that supports SATA is able to support Slumber. Slumber has been in the SATA spec since forever, and pretty much all 2.5" drives, and some 3.5" drives support this power state.
metayoshi - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
P.S. As an example, I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 sitting in my cubicle at work on an Asus PSE WS Pro motherboard. I have no Idea how old this thing is, but it's running a SATA-II 3.0 Gbps interface, and that great grandfather of a system supports HIPM+DIPM, and does Partial and Slumber on a variety of SSDs and HDDs.eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Newegg has a promotion for these drives ending 12/14/14 (US $) -120GB @ $89.99
250GB @ $139.99
500GB @ $249.99
1TB @ $469.99
eddieobscurant - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I think an 120gb 850 evo usb thumb drive would be awesome .dwade123 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Realworld: all modern ssds have similar windows boot and game loading time. All these synthetic tests are just for reviewers to have something talk about, and marketing purposes. Meh.StrangerGuy - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I would rather want a SSD that has 90% of a MX100 but only 50% dollar per GB, instead of extra performance that 99% of SSD buyers will not never benefit for more money.KAlmquist - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
My guess is that Samsung doesn't have the ability to produce very much V-NAND. So the 850 PRO, and now the 850 EVO, are priced to encourage most people to choose SSD's from the 840 line rather than the 850 line, preventing demand for the 850 line from exceeding the supply.rms141 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
The absence of the Samsung 840 Pro from the Storage Bench 2013 section is pretty odd. Why wouldn't you include the previous generation's higher performing product? This is a little bit like publishing a GTX 970 review without including the GTX 780 for reference.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
You can always use the Bench tool to compare any and all drives that we have tested over the years:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
fokka - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
it doesn't make much sense to complain about the msrp when the drive is just now trickling to retailers. you're probably not gonna make a good deal on a 850 evo before christmas, but the prices will come down considerably in q1/q2 2015, they always do.that said, i wouldn't mind paying a couple bucks more for a 850, compared to a 840, since it's just the all around better drive and it's lower power consumption alone makes it the better option for laptops.
pitted against an mx100 it might be a tougher sell, but let's just wait a bit for the prices to come down and give the early adopters some time to beta-test the firmware for us in the meantime.
Morawka - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Does TurboWrite, native encryption, and TRIM work in RAID 0 on the 850 EVO? Thats the only way i would invest $500+ into a SSD still bottlenecked by Sata 6hojnikb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
All of that should work with appropriate motherboard/storage drives, because drive itself is not aware whenever is in RAID or not.hojnikb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
*driverspaesan - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I just got a 1TB 840 evo for $369. No way the 850 evo is worth the extra $100.R3MF - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
How do you conduct this review of a perfomance oriented SSD without discussing:1. m.2 format (or lack thereof)?
2. PCIe 3.0 4x m.2 performance (vs SATA 6G)?
3. NVME m.2 performance (vs SATA 6G)?
It is the end of 2014, who seriously spends £320 on a 1TB performance SSD without considering the high-speed m.2 drives just around the corner, to which a growing number of enthusiasts have empty slots on their shiny new motherboards?
hojnikb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
>How do you conduct this review of a perfomance oriented SSD without discussing:EVO is not a performance oriented drive. 850PRO is. And this was already discussed in other reviews/seperate articles.
R3MF - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
my mistake, i had presumed that the Pro was not a consumer part.still, six months on with the arrival of tons of X99 and Z97 boards sporting m.2 slots, and the drives based on the marvell controller just months away, i'd have thought it would merit a mention.
hojnikb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
There is a separate article adressing this....cm2187 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
But out of curiosity, what are you going to do with the extra performance? Who actually has any use specs higher than what the EVO already offers. It is certainly the case on some heavy load server but for end users, even enthusiasts like me, I am not sure I would get an even slightly better experience by beating the SATA 3 specs.R3MF - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I presume that SATA express and m.2 were invented for no reason then?Bandwidth is useful, as is lower latency.
cm2187 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Well, it's not because it is invented that it is useful. It's like having dozen of cores in a CPU. Some applications will have some use for these cores (certainly relevant on servers or for virtualization). But the vast majority of common applications are single threaded so people should rather focus on higher clock rates. I'm always happy to see higher specs but I just wonder which of my application will be faster with M2.Supercell99 - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
Virtualization. I run VMware with several OS's running at the same time on my desktop. Being able to startup and have these run off a low latency disk is nice. Power users always have a need for high bandwidth, low latency I/O.hojnikb - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
These can be used for PCI-E or SATA protoco. In fact, most m.2 drives run sata instead of pci-edcaxax - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I'm unconvinced by Samsung. My SSD 830 is doing ok, having suffered an acceptable 30% performance decline (which may be correctable via secure erase but I will not test this).But my 840 (non-EVO) which works in my HTPC and sees limited use outside of the hibernation file (60 of the drive is empty by the way) is now running more than 60-70% slower.
This is just unacceptable in a system which supports trim (win 7 x64). Samsung have done nothing to rectify this, claiming these problems occur on their EVO line. Until they change their approach, I'm inclined to distrust their latest cost-saving "innovation" and give my money to crucial instead.
simonpschmitt - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Dear Mr. Vättö,while I don't think it would necessary belong into this article R3MF has a point. What is the state of SATAExpress, NGFF, m.2, ... currently? My laptop is 18 Month old and has an unuses m.2-slot witch, to my knowledge, nobody ever put an SSD into. You seem to have an ear to the ground when it comes to the SSD-Industry. There are a few questions you might have a qualified opinion about:
- Will we be seeing current-gen (meaning 850 EVO-gen) m.2/SATAExpress SSDs?
- If yes, up to wich capacity in wich form factor (2242, 2280, ...)?
- with regards to m.2: Will there be mainly PCIe (2 lanes/4lanes) drives or SATA?
- When do you suppose these will be an economically viable alternative to 2.5" given both slots are available?
In your personal opinion:
- What is the point of SATAExpress when literally every SATAExpress-Device also has m.2?
- Will there be a subjective improvement for the normal or enthusiast (non Datacenter) user with the switch to PCIe?
A quick blurb, perhaps in the form of a short pipeline aticle, would be much appreciated.
An other thing I always wondered about: While I am amazed with the percieved benefits of an SSD vs. an HDD game-load-times often seem not to change at all. It's more of an oddity than a real concern but my new system (i5 4200, 8GB, 840 EVO) often has the same load times than my old system (i3 330, 4GB, HDD). I always thought load times were mainly dependent on how fast the data can be read (HDD/SDD bound) and how fast it can be processed/extracted (CPU bound). Is there a factor I'm missing or do games just not take advantage of certain kinds of faster hardware.
Perhaps you or some of the other readers can help me with my curiosity.
Thanks, Simon
metayoshi - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I can't answer all of your questions, but I can answer the gaming part.With regards to gaming, it really depends on the game. Many games these days are relatively optimized on loading, so running them on an HDD or SSD doesn't matter too much since they like to load parts of the game in the background. However, there are some games where having an SSD is completely noticeable. As an avid World of Warcraft player, I can tell which raid members have SSDs and which don't because those of us with SSDs simply appear in the raid much faster than those on HDDs when switching zones. I mean, it definitely doesn't hinder gameplay too much since the only thing that takes a while is actually getting into the zone. The rest of the zone is in RAM already, so getting to and fighting bosses are instantaneous. I used to have a 7200 RPM drive before too. For me, the difference is completely noticeable now that I have had an SSD for a couple of years now.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Hi Simon,Sorry for taking a while to respond -- I had to focus on my finals after I got the review done, so I couldn't catch up with all the comments until now.
The 850 EVO is still a SATA 6Gbps design, so there won't be a SATA Express version of it. There may (and likely will) be an M.2 version coming, although that would also be limited to SATA 6Gbps since M.2 can support both SATA and PCIe interfaces. As for the form factors and capacities, it's impossible to say for sure but technically the 2242 form factor could max out at 512GB and the 2280 at 2TB (assuming double-sided PCB and 16x128Gbit dies per package).
However, the SM951/PM951 will be available sometime next year, although it will be limited to OEM channels again (RamCity saves you, again). That's the PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe M.2 drive with 3D NAND (SM=MLC, PM=TLC). I don't have any further details at this point, unfortunately.
Regarding other PCIe SSDs, I should know more after CES when I meet with all the companies again and get an update on their schedules, but for now it looks like most designs are aiming at mid-2015 launch.
akula2 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
850 Pros are my last Samsung SSD products to buy. For the upcoming X99 extreme workstations, I'll to go with:1) SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB (today $490 vs $600 of 850 Pro). The performance of both SSDs are comparable.
2) Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe 960GB PCI-E SSD: this one decimates all the best SSDs.
3) Intel SSD DC P3700 800GB and 1.6TB models: The King
HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
This is the problem with Samsung. When they first came into the market, they blew the competition away with incredible performance, reliability, and pricing.The 840 came with TLC, promising superior pricing with good performance, but in fact pricing was out of whack, putting it way above the 830 that had just left the market. Then 840 Pro took over the high end where only fools dare to tread.
The 850 line (Pro and EVO) raise the prices even higher. It's like Samsung thinks they're the Apple of SSD's and can do whatever they want in pricing. To hell with the competition, people will pay whatever they say.
It's a shame. Way back, I got an 830 because it was a great value. This time around? I waited until Black Friday and picked up a Sandisk after waiting a couple of years for Samsung to remove their head from out of their butt. My 480GB Extreme Pro only cost me $185 and it will last me a good long while.
That could have been you, Samsung. I didn't want to put another brand SSD in my machine. I wanted to have only one Samsung Magician. But Samsung pricing is completely absurd.
So, eh, bye bye, Samsung.
Supercell99 - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
They acting like Intel with does Xeon chips, except, Samsung actually has other competition with SSD's. Like you, with my next SSD purchase, I will have to look at other companies as Samsung's $/GB vs the competition has continued to get worse.philipma1957 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I would like a 1.2th ssd that is really 1.5tb with extra provisioning.I would like it to have good 4k random read writes more then anything.
I have 2 1tb ssds and use them for mac minis.
I use external thunderbolt drives and boot with the 1 tb ssd's the drive in the mini is merely a back up for me. I find I could use a little bigger then 1tb for the video recording I do. Still waiting for a bigger ssd.
harrynsally - Saturday, December 27, 2014 - link
Didn't take long for the MSRP to drop. Was on sale at Newegg and I just bought a 250GB 850 EVO for $114 shipped.Although I previously, purchased two Crucial 256GB MX100s, to use in a couple of older laptops, which installed and continue to run flawlessly, wanted to upgrade the HDD in a new laptop.
Was really conflicted in not buying another MX100, but the better performance specification and 5 year warranty won out.
rvb - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link
Has anyone seen info for the write-block and erase-block sizes for the 1TB 850 Pro? I am intending to RAID 4 of them together, and I want to make sure that my RAID's stride-size is a multiple of the larger of those two values. If they are both something small like 4KiB, then pretty much any larger Pow2 value I choose will be fine. But my only other SSD purchase (OCZ Vertex 4) had a WBS of 8KiB and an EBS of 2MiB. In that case, if I'm going to be writing large files to my RAID, then I think it's useful to know that the EBS is so large, so that I can set my RAID stride-size accordingly.Samsung's "data sheet" for the 850 Pro series neglects to give this information... however, I do note that they only quote random-write performance in terms of 4KB transfers, which may imply that at least their WBS is 4KiB. I just wish I knew for certain, and also the EBS ?
mirkogutic - Saturday, January 24, 2015 - link
Hi, i own 2 of the 120GB Samsung EVO 850.Should I put them in RAID 0 or leave them as separate drives?
It seems that Samsung Magician works only when drives are not in RAID mode.
Also, RAPID mode works only on one drive and when not in RAID.
Nilth - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Sorry for the probably dumb question, but isn't the way turbowrite works detrimental for the ssd longevity? If I understood correctly, (almost) ALL the writes are going to pass through the same "x" GB slc buffer. Isn't that partition going to "wear out" son enough?djdownfawl - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
@Kristian VättöAs of today's prices Samsung 850 EVO vs the PRO. Would you recommend buying the EVO or the PRO?
sylerner - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
The over-provisioning figures in the article are larger than the actual over-provisioning values.The source of error is failure to account for the flash memory used for TurboWrite.
The correct values are:
120GB: 10.6%
250GB, 500GB and 1TB: 8.0%
Lonerski - Sunday, January 31, 2016 - link
Did you use Rapid Mode in those benches ?CricDasher - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Samsung SSD 850 Evo is a life-changer for anyone who uses it. With the sleek and beautiful build quality, Evo 850 does obviously come with a great price tag.There are of course different capacities of the given product, but I preferred to use the 120 GB version, largely due to the relatively low price and my actual need of owning an SSD.
My major requirement was to install the Operating System and few other mostly used applications inside the SSD, so that the whole computer looks so fast. Samsung Evo 850 120 GB SSD has done the job fantastically for me so far and I highly recommend this product to everyone.
Out of the sellers online, GearBest seems to offer the best package since GB is a trusted source of products. They are offering a flash sale at the moment and you may try it to get it for a relatively a low price.
http://www.gearbest.com/hdd-ssd/pp_311494.html?vip...
Budburnicus - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
Samsung OWNS the SSD market! When I can buy an 850 EVO 500 GB model for just $110 and get for all intents and purposes, the BEST possible speed from a SATA 6 drive - there is REALLY NO POINT in buying ANY other brand!I mean the 850 EVO keeps up with, and sometimes even SURPASSES the 850 PRO - often in ways that will benefit the average power user/gamer more!
I wonder how much of that is due to the 6 GB of SLC write cache - as the 850 PRO series has no SLC NAND whatsoever!
Also, once the "Magical" storage capacity of 480 GB and above is reached, again, for JUST $110 - not only is that more than sufficient to hold my OS and all the games I play, but all SSDs tend to perform best at 480 GB and above, I would say for the 850 EVO series, this is DOUBLY TRUE! Due to the fact that the 500 GB model has a full 6 GB of SLC Turbo-write NAND (compared to 3 for the 250 and 120) - but it also has a full 512 MB of DDR3L on it!
I dunno why Anandtech has it listed as DDR2L memory, but it is indeed DDR3L RAM on ALL Samsung 850 series drives!
Tornadotuan - Friday, July 8, 2016 - link
Hi Hardware Community,I know this article is quite outdated right now, nevertheless the actual topic of the authors "Final Words" bug me right now. Especially now that enough time for longtime-endurance tests has passed.
Anyway, I can´t choose between the Samsung EVO 850 1TB v2 (289€) and die SanDisk Extreme 960GB (281€).
So pricewise the "Pro" is even cheaper right now compared to the Samsung. But there are some obvious differences:
- TLC 3D V-NAND vs. MLC Planar
- 5 years vs. 10 years warranty
- 150 TBW vs. 80 TBW
- higher Peak vs. consistency
- Samsung Bugging vs. sudden death drives
My usage:
- Client for everything: gaming, programming, office, multimedia - averything
- gonna split it in system and data-partition
- gonne be in laptop that´s used as desktop
- battery is wasted, so no concern about power consumption
So, usually I use hardware until it´s broken so meaning about 8-10 years.
Still I want steady performance without sudden decline in speed like with the EVO 840 :C
I´d be really glad, if you could tell me your opinion on this :)
Robbin1111 - Saturday, April 28, 2018 - link
Awesome drivers! Anyone has a code for this? I checked several sites, likehttps://www.retailmenot.com/coupons/samsung,
https://dealspure.com/Samsung-Electronics-Promo-Co...
but couldn't find one. My mom has an aging Dell D830, which is very slow and I'm looking for a reasonably priced replacement, and I think this driver is great.
rocky12345 - Thursday, January 30, 2020 - link
Yes this is a older review but just posting in 2020 on how my Samsung 850 EVO 500Gb has stood up to the wear & tear of every day computing. I have had my drive since 2015 in a computer that is on for many hours a day since I got the drive.The system gets used a lot so everything gets a really nice work out everyday. According to the Samsung software my drive is only at 2% of it's rated endurance lifespan. Not to bad for a drive that gets hit pretty hard everyday with reads and writes and to still have 98% life endurance left after all these years of use.
I read this review back in 2014 and it was one of the reasons I decided to get this drive for my system. I just came from a new write up form this site talking about a Midrive setup. What got me thinking about TLC nand was not the write up itself but a comment from a user and how they were saying just how bad QLC & TLC nand was and how they had low endurance lifespans.
Am I missing something here? My drive has TLC 3D V-nand made by Samsung and the drive is still at 98% endurance left on the SSD. Is Samsung's 3D V-nand better than regular TLC chips and lasts longer because of it. Yes my drive is getting up there in age and I plan on replacing it once I do a full system update and I will be getting a much faster NVMe PCI-e 4.0 drive.
As for the Samsung SSD I probably will use it to cache my 4 4TB hard drives since AMD has that caching setup in their platform and I can still find a good use for the Sata SSD I currently have. For now it is very snappy and the system feels very fast still with things such as Chrome or Firefox opening in half a second or Windows still booting up in a mere 7 seconds right after the bios post screen to the desktop so not worried about speed just quite yet.