Samsung 850 EVO vs. Mushkin Reactor SSD--will I notice any difference?

Hastibe

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Feb 25, 2010
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I have a 2012 Lenovo Y480 with a 1TB mechanical hard drive that I'd like to upgrade to a 1TB SSD. I'm looking at getting either the 1TB Samsung 850 EVO (currently about $290) or 1TB Mushkin Reactor (currently about $230).

It looks like the Samsung gets somewhat better performance (for instance, see all the graphs and charts, here and here, where they compare the two drives), but the Mushkin is also quite a bit cheaper, so, my question is: will the difference in performance between the two drives be meaningful/noticeable?

For instance, when it says the Mushkin Reactor scores around 400 seconds for latency during its light workloads service times test while the Samsung 850 EVO scores only 200 seconds, what does this mean in terms of a real world difference between the two drives? What will I notice?

Or are we just talking about tenths of a second in differences, realistically, for how I use my computer? (I tend to keep about 50 browser tabs open in Chrome, which will include several paused and one active 1080p YouTube video, so a lot is cached to the hard drive or at least it seems to kill my mechanical hard drive's performance, I play some games, and probably everything else I do is less intensive).
 
with the extra money for the samsung drive you get ssd software that checks and sets the drive health up. also with some of the ssd they have samsung drive cloning software with the ssd. when you buy a ssd look at the controller chip/software and firmware support. when ssd first came out there were a lot of bricking due to bad ssd firmware. when you buy these cheaper drivers there just rebranded oem drives.
 

It does seem like the Samsung is slightly more reliable--I'm good about using Dropbox for critical files and regular back-ups to external drives for everything else, though, so that doesn't bother me incredibly. About the Samsung being likely to last longer, The Wirecutter said this, which made me think I could pretty much ignore write endurance differences:

"The 850 EVO uses Samsung’s new 3D TLC NAND, so it has a much higher write endurance rating than the 840 EVO, its predecessor. The 500GB version is also rated for 150 TB of writes, double the rating of the Crucial MX100 or the newer BX100. In real life, all SSDs should easily write many times that. It’s almost impossible to wear out a consumer SSD before the drive itself is obsolete."


Hmh! About the Samsung coming with software that monitors drive health, aren't there third party programs that I could just use?

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

 
I think I'm okay with having a drive that is a little less reliable, as the Mushkin Reactor drives still seem to be very reliable (right?), and I back stuff up regularly (using Dropbox and an external drive)... So, I guess the question boils down to this: is the Samsung SSD management software worth $60? (The difference between the $290 Samsung and $230 Mushkin.)