Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: 3D Vertical NAND Hits Desktop Storage

[cryan]

After winning an award last year for its 840 EVO, Samsung is ready to follow up with another high-end offering. The company's 850 Pro SSD merges the EVO's familiar MEX controller with 3D V-NAND. Does the combination justify an upgrade, or should you wait?

Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: 3D Vertical NAND Hits Desktop Storage : Read more

 

[MoulaZX]

I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

 

[cryan]

I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

I don't know if this really changes anything for you. Two EVOs are still going to be better than one 850 Pro in [most] every way. But I understand the sentiment!

Christopher Ryan

 

[lp231]

I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

You just ordered a few hours ago. Just cancel your order if you really want this 850 Pro.

 

[tomfreak]

10yrs warranty, may be finally I have a reason to buy SSD. lol

 

[g-unit1111]

10yrs warranty, may be finally I have a reason to buy SSD. lol

I can guarantee that in 10 years you won't own that drive anymore. :lol:

 

[10tacle]

I still have several 8-10 year old drives laying around between 80GB-150GB. I mostly use them as external drives for backing up USB thumb drives and other files that aren't large volume.

 

[helper800]

Hoping for some SATA 12gbs (or more) transfer speeds in the coming years.

 

[razor512]

Will overclocking the bus that the sata controller is on impact the performance?

Can you test on an AMD platform which makes it easier to over clock that bus and some of the connected components?

 

[BestJinjo]

Looking forward to future generations of 3D Vertical Nand on M.2 / M.2 Ultra interface. Too bad SATA 3 is all maxed out and the next generation standards are not yet mainstream for the masses which is holding back SSD performance. As far as this drive goes, it's only slightly faster than MX100 but costs double. I don't think it's worth it. MX100 512GB sounds like a perfect stop-gap until M.2/SATAe drives arrive with 1-1.5TB/sec throughput. Perhaps Samsung will give us 95% of the performance for a fraction of the price in the 850 EVO.

 

[MoulaZX]

I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

I don't know if this really changes anything for you. Two EVOs are still going to be better than one 850 Pro in [most] every way. But I understand the sentiment!

Christopher Ryan

Not quite. One is for my Desktop, the other is for my Father's Desktop.

For my Desktop, I'll be stepping up from 2x OCZ Vertex 2 60GB in RAID 0. Hope it'll be worth it...

 

[MoulaZX]

I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

I don't know if this really changes anything for you. Two EVOs are still going to be better than one 850 Pro in [most] every way. But I understand the sentiment!

Christopher Ryan

Not quite. One is for my Desktop, the other is for my Father's Desktop.

For my Desktop, I'll be stepping up from 2x OCZ Vertex 2 60GB in RAID 0. Hope it'll be worth it...

 

[cpy]

Why does tom hardware looks like website from 1990? This page is narrow as hell!

 

[Flying-Q]

Why does tom hardware looks like website from 1990? This page is narrow as hell!

That would be to give more room for the sidebar adverts.

 

[Novuake]

Impressive, didn't think some of these numbers were possible via SATA3.

But the limit has now been reached in almost every way.

Which solution will stick? Anyone care to guess?

 

[crawlgsx]

Eh, unimpressed. Sure its a nice bump but when I look at how long the 840 Pro has been on the market and compare it to the increase to the soon coming 850 Pro, to say the least it doesn't make me want to run out and replace my 840's.

 

[cryan]

Hmm, what's next for SATA? SATA4? SATA 3.2 (SATA Express) doesn't look like a long term solution. PCI-E is fine, but SATA is still so convenient.

I disagree. SATA Express melds the convenience of SATA and pcie performance. With NVMe and Gen 3 PCIe, I think there WILL be much to like.

Christopher Ryan

 

[RedJaron]

That much speed for that little power draw? Impressive.

 

[arneberg]

SATA Express haw to wide Cables as bad as the old IDE Cables M.2 or PCIE cards

 

[xenol]

Part of me doesn't care about bandwidth. I've had Windows 7 load up much faster (as in the throbber didn't get to finish) on a laptop with a SATA 3Gbps interface than a desktop using the 6Gbps interface. And most of the time file accesses are small, but many.

I'd rather start seeing IOPS crank up to RAM levels.

 

[WyomingKnott]

The main reason not to go to SATA 4 and double the throughput rate again is not a signalling issue. SATA was designed for rotating magnetic media. There are limitations that are removed in the rising standards, although the next generation of storage will probably find those brilliant improvements to be a bottleneck!

 

[dgingeri]

I like the look of this drive, but it's not quite enough to get me to upgrade from my 840 Pro/ 840 EVO combo, especially at those prices. The warranty is a nice feature, though. This drive looks like the best we can ever expect from SATA3.

I have a board that has a 2 lane M.2 PCIe slot. Once I see a drive that performs as well or better than this in that form factor at 500-512GB, I'll go for that, and no sooner.

 

[coolitic]

It's about dang time.

 

[rantoc]

With 10 years warranty Samsung really have belief in the product, guess ill wait a couple of months to see if it has reliability issues before considering striking a deal or two

 

[mapesdhs]

MoulaZX writes:
> For my Desktop, I'll be stepping up from 2x OCZ Vertex 2 60GB in RAID 0.
> Hope it'll be worth it...

What model is your motherboard? If your system is just SATA2, the EVO may
or may not be quicker, kinda depends. I did loads of RAID0 tests using various
numbers of Vertex2E 120GB drives (tad quicker than the 60GB, but relevant
nonetheless). See:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/ssd_tests.txt

Compared to a single 840 250GB or Vector 128GB, the 2xV2E/120 RAID0 was
quicker for sequential I/O, slower for 4K random read, 2X faster for 4K random
write, roughly the same for 4K/64-thread read/write (AS-SSD), faster for CDM
512K read, and slower for CDM 512K write (ignore the ATTO results, they're a
bit whacko anyway).

Alas I didn't have time to run the real-world app-start/load tests on the RAID0
configs, and I've not yet run the same tests with a SATA3 setup. Useful data
for users of older SATA2 systems though I hope, and here's some extra data
testing a Vector 256GB with various types of SATA2/3 so you can compare to
the Vector's SATA2 results above (note that the Vector shows up fairly well
in the 850 Pro review, so it's a good model for this sort of general testing):

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/sata_vector_tests.txt


Overall, I think you'll be happy with the EVOs, though TBH I'm surprised you
didn't go for a couple of MX100 256GB units; I would have I think. Mind you,
for reliability I'd probably change my mind at the last minute & buy Samsungs.

Ian.