Samsung Evo 840, Samsung Evo 850, Samsung 850 Pro Which One?

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vladicorp

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Oct 22, 2012
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Hello, I am planing to buy my first SDD hard drive in my life, and was wondering which one of those 3 models should I get ?

Samsung Evo 840, Samsung Evo 850, Samsung 850 Pro

I am interested to know if there is any difference that a person can feel with one or a another of them. I will use the SSD to install windows , adobe creative suit, and to use it for a temp drive for photoshop. no games.
 
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Yea I would agree about getting a 850 Evo if you're paying full price, it is about 10-15% faster. But the 840 Evo will have bigger sales this season, so if you find it on sale I would recommend saving the money.
 
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I personally value capacity over speed in day to day applications. Were I maintaining a high I/O server, I'd want the faster drive, but for personal computing the Crucial MX100 is where my recommendation lies. The 512GB version is roughly as fast as the 840s, but the 850 is unrivaled right now when it comes to SATA SSDs. It also is a heck of a lot cheaper. Just some food for thought!
 
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On this topic -- as I was struggling through similar questions as well and so far here are my findings:

My "stake in the ground" was the EVO 840 as well. Its is a great drive but its older, and the likes of MX100 and others are making improvements both in performance and in reliability. I ruled out the MX100 (and other Crucial drives) because for some silly reason I really value the software utilities available from others. no offense to Crucial but they need to step up and provide a good set of utilities. Call me a utilities guy...I admit it. guilty as charged. Utilities good. no utilities bad.

Once I ruled out Crucial, I started looking more favorably at Samsung, and specifically the 850 EVO for a few bucks more than the 840. There are some performance improvements but looks like the 850 EVO overall more solid drive than the 840 as well. Its just that here are other attractive choices at this price point.

Once committed to a medium to high priced consumer SSD, I then re-evaluated my "strong software utilities" requirement and realized there are two big players with substantial offerings here: Samsung and SanDisk. By then I realized that SanDisk Extreme pro appears to outrun the Samsung 850, if only by measurable benchmarks, but also comes with a stronger more feature rich set of software utilities, some power saving support that is favorable to laptops, and a 10 year warranty which is attractive from standpoint of future proofing. 10 years is a unbelievably long time - the same as infinity in the industry today -- not many of us are still using drives from 10 years ago lol lol. So the 10 year thing is more of a statement of confidence to me, than an expression of how long I would use the drive. SATA itself may not even be around in 10 years, and we may be adding storage like RAM is today, for all I know 😀 -- or we won't have "drives" in today's sense, with the overhead of a controller that pretends to act like a rotating drive from the 1980s

As for the attractive options, considering my requirements of "a large, higher performing drive with great software utilities" here are the choices that I cam up with:

Sandisk Extreme Pro 960 GB: $480
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB $470
Crucial M550 1TB $450 (close, but no software)

all these drives are similarly priced, and if one values the software utilities the Sandisk represents the better choice over the Samsung, for a paltry $10 premium.

So thats how I talked myself into an extreme pro! what are the holes in my thinking?

 
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I use hardware RAID controller.

Set SATA mode to RAID from BIOS (default is AHCI)
and then create RAID in boot (ctrl+I to open Intel Rapid Storage Utility)
 
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What does it do exactly? Just combines all of the SSDs' speeds together?
 
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RAID0 is so called split raid. My two drives shows to system as one 512GB drive. So it writes files in eg. 128kB (usually that is default but can be changed if needed) slides to both drives. Then system can read & write from/to both drives simultanously, which almost doubles the performance.
 
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That's cool, how many SSDs can I combine together?
 
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Stay away from RAID 0. What they're not telling you is that RAID 0 is only meant for temporary high-speed storage. In Raid 0 your data is spread out across all drives in the RAID array, so if a single drive fails, the data on all drives is lost.

1) Raid 0 is fine if it will only be used as a temp drive (scratch drive for Photoshop, Premeire, etc.)

2) If you want to use your SSD for everything and use Photoshop a lot, get the 850 Pro as it is faster and has a longer lifespan.

3) If you want to use your SSD for everything and use Photoshop occasionally, get the 850 EVO as it is cheaper then the 850 Pro and has a longer lifespan than the 840 EVO.
 
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So I shouldn't use RAID at all if all I do is game and watch movies? I already have 2TB of 850 Pro, just leave them separated?
 
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I don't understand why people fear RAID0. If you have 2x256GB in RAID0 it's same than having 1x512GB (except almost twice as fast). If disk brakes down and you don't have backups you are screwed in both cases. If someone can explain me, how is it so much more likely that one of two drives brakes down than one drive brakes down, please tell me... I'm waiting...

And also if one drive from RAID0 brakes down you need to buy smaller and cheaper drive than with one bigger drive. Is that bad thing?

Still if you have loose money you can also build safer and faster system by using eg. 4+ drives and RAID0+1, RAID5 or RAID6, but nothig is absolutely foolproof anyway.
 
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Because the possibility of a failure increases by the number of drives in the array. a 2-drive RAID 0 array is twice as likely to fail when compared to a single drive. Note that I said "possibility". You might get the same lifespan out of your RAID 0 array as a single drive, but the possibility for failure is higher.


So you would really feel safe rebuilding your failed array using one new drive and one used drive? This increases the likelyhood of another failure as the used drive is likely to fail sooner than the new one.

Do they even teach math in school anymore?
 
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Yes, the possibility is higher, but so what? The possibility is there anyway and if you don't have backups from important unreproducible stuff, it's gone...

And still I use RAID0 only in my system drive which I can install from scratch if I like to... I just like it fast more than fail safe, end of story...

P.S. And yes, I feel safe with one new and one old drive RAID0. Who sais that new drive will last longer than the old?
 
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If you wish to use RAID 0 in order to get the extra speed, that's fine because you know the risks and accept them. Just don't recommend it to other people without explaining the risks, so they can decide for themselves if RAID 0 is really what they want. Not everyone is willing to risk reliability for speed, especially when SSDs are already super fast.

 
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