The 860 EVO Review: Samsung Back On Top

[Guest]

The world's best selling SSD just got a makeover. Today we see how Samsung increased its performance and longevity.

The 860 EVO Review: Samsung Back On Top : Read more

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Excellent , thanks!

 

[logainofhades]

I think I would rather have the better Price/GB of an MX300. MX300 has more storage and is cheaper. The 960 evo isn't much more either really, at the 250gb level anyway.


PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 250GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($118.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 250GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($94.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial - MX300 275GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($89.89 @ OutletPC)
Total: $303.87
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-02-08 16:21 EST-0500

 

[AlistairAB]

So basically the MX500 is cheaper and even has better random read performance (the only metric i really pay attention to).

Also Samsung doesn't provide warranty service in Canada properly, a caution to readers. (Search for horror stories about the 960 EVO warranty process in Canada at redflagdeals if you want more... basically they stonewall you requiring you to return to retailers, which is how it works in Europe, not in Canada).

Buy Crucial.

 

[ibjeepr]

Awesome, sticking with my 850 Evo 1TB then. Thanks for the info!

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Sticking with my Samsung 960 EVO Series 1TB too , crazy fast , but the 860 is another solid release from Samsung , best on the market in terms of reliability.

 

[HERETIC-1]

Nice one Chris.
Pity no 250GB Sandisk/WD to complete the set..................

 

[Martell1977]

So it seems that this is a 850 EVO but with higher bandwidth and warranty. I'm glad to see that my 850 EVO 500gb is still one of the best. Seems that performance for these drives has been stagnate for a while now.

 

[Radar_1]

If I decide to head to the store and purchase a new SSD, the 850 EVO appears to still be the best bang for your dollar.

 

[JonDol]

"The 860 EVO has half the endurance of the new 860 Pro, but it's still quite a bit more than competing products. It's a good argument, but who really cares?" Well, I do. For that reason I only buy the Pro ones and I'd buy the EVOs above all the others if the Pro weren't available.

About the title: I wasn't even aware that Samsung had lost the leading spot

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Thanks for the article Chris. I enjoy reading your work.

 

[Kahless01]

Oh ffs. don't do line graphs if youre just going to make a big brown line. either make it only read from 475-550 so the differences are discernable or leave the graph out. when it looks like one thick line its not giving any usable information.

 

[rgeiken]

I have installed 4 850 EVO 500 Gig SSD in 4 different computers and I am an enthusiastic fan of Samsung because of that. It makes it an entirely different computer since everything happens much faster than it would with a conventional hard drive which I have used over the earlier periods of my life. The 500 Gig can be found on line for $130 to $170. Just shop around and find one at the price you are satisfied with. The Migration software worked just fine for the last 3 SSDs I installed since it was improved from the first version that they released. If you have a desktop, it is a piece of cake to clone it and replace the old one. It can be harder to do on a laptop depending on how it was made. An HP Laptop that I installed one on turned out to be a lot of mechanical working opening the computer up. With my older Lenovo, it was much easier since I only had to remove the cover from a small compartment after I had cloned the drive. It only took less than 15 minutes to install that one.

 

[CRamseyer]

Oh ffs. don't do line graphs if youre just going to make a big brown line. either make it only read from 475-550 so the differences are discernable or leave the graph out. when it looks like one thick line its not giving any usable information.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't. All charts have to start with zero because some demand it.

 

[CRamseyer]

Thanks for the article Chris. I enjoy reading your work.

Thanks!

 

[emv]

Interesting... the 800 series EVO line is consistently priced over 10% higher than Micron/Crucial. No effort by Samsung to be lowest price. Micron and PNY and Adata seem to be lowest cost. But Samsung still outsells them by 3x or more in channel

 

[araczynski]

I have an old 830 120GB as my main OS/boot drive (plus 3 others for games Samsung 250 & 500, plus a Corsair? 750?, plus a few 3TB spinners for storage), have been on the lookout to replace the OS one, just not really sure with what model (probably a ~250GB should be sufficient).

Stuck between 850/860 EVO and the MX500...

 

[araczynski]

Oh ffs. don't do line graphs if youre just going to make a big brown line. either make it only read from 475-550 so the differences are discernable or leave the graph out. when it looks like one thick line its not giving any usable information.

the 'zoomed in' graph you're after is what's preferred by marketing departments, as it makes slight variances look huge/significant in order to justify whatever they want to claim.

the 0-max graphs shown indicate relative real world performance. i.e. what marketing doesn't want you to grasp, i.e. that brands A, B, C, D, E... are the same as far as anyone will care when in use (in that metric).

Lets keep the marketing crap to a minimum and show the real world stuff.

 

[closs.sebastien]

My conclusion is that we don't see any more any differences between sata ssd, so just take the cheaper.
If you really want the fastest, take a 850pro/860pro in M2 format.

 

[cryoburner]

Oh ffs. don't do line graphs if youre just going to make a big brown line. either make it only read from 475-550 so the differences are discernable or leave the graph out. when it looks like one thick line its not giving any usable information.

If the lines are on top of each other, then that should stress the fact that the differences between them are so minimal that it doesn't really matter. Stretching the range out to fill the graph would wrongly give many people the impression that the differences are actually worth noting. To a casual observer, a particular drive might look twice as fast as the competition on such a cropped graph, when in reality there might only be a two percent difference in performance between the drives. And only the sequential test graphs are really like that here, since these particular drives are all SATA models running into the performance limits of the SATA interface. On an NVME drive review, the differences will be much larger, since they aren't getting capped by the performance limits of SATA. See the sequential graphs in this review, for example...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/plextor-m9pe-ssd-review,5408-2.html

Overall, this drive seems pretty underwhelming though. Overall performance might be slightly higher than the competition, but at a significantly higher cost. Compared to the Crucial MX500, you're looking at a 25% higher price on the 500GB model for performance differences that will be indistinguishable. Samsung is using their brand recognition as an excuse to increase the prices of these drives while offering practically the same performance.

"The 860 EVO has half the endurance of the new 860 Pro, but it's still quite a bit more than competing products. It's a good argument, but who really cares?" Well, I do. For that reason I only buy the Pro ones and I'd buy the EVOs above all the others if the Pro weren't available.

Unless you're using the drives for certain professional workloads that involve a huge amount of writes, that really shouldn't matter though. Comparing the 512GB models, for example, the 860 Evo is rated for 300TB of writes, while the 860 Pro is rated for 600TB. In order to hit that amount of writes within the drive's 5-year warranty, you would need to write over 160GB of data to the 860 Evo every single day for 5 years, or over 320GB to the drive every day for the 860 Pro. Most people don't write much more than 10GB to their drive each day, and at that rate it would take over 80 years to hit that amount of writes for the Evo, and over 160 years for the Pro. Other components of the drives would undoubtedly fail long before that, assuming the performance and capacity of these drives is considered adequate to be useable even 10 years from now.

It's also been shown that these endurance ratings are not hard limits (except on Intel drives), and the drives can typically handle far more writes than they are rated for. The rating is more there for warranty purposes, and to help give the impression that the professional models are somehow better, but in practice, practically no one will be writing anywhere close to those amounts of data to their drives.

 

[Lutfij]

Nicely written, Chris! This will help in narrowing down an SSD when friends coming knocking.

 

[JonDol]

Unless you're using the drives for certain professional workloads that involve a huge amount of writes, that really shouldn't matter though. Comparing the 512GB models, for example, the 860 Evo is rated for 300TB of writes, while the 860 Pro is rated for 600TB. In order to hit that amount of writes within the drive's 5-year warranty, you would need to write over 160GB of data to the 860 Evo every single day for 5 years, or over 320GB to the drive every day for the 860 Pro. Most people don't write much more than 10GB to their drive each day, and at that rate it would take over 80 years to hit that amount of writes for the Evo, and over 160 years for the Pro. Other components of the drives would undoubtedly fail long before that, assuming the performance and capacity of these drives is considered adequate to be useable even 10 years from now.

Hey there,
For me, your post is a typical example of the differences between the theory and the reality and knowing the reality I don't feel confortable with your theory. You don't have to write those ammounts of data yourself, others will take care of that for you:
- if I leave my computer idle for a few hours with absolutely no apps/useless services started, there is an intense disk activity although I only have manual antivirus scans and I've disabled all the known AV, Microsoft, Intel and other telemetry tasks
- some months ago we were talking about a buggy Spotify app that wrote about 300 GB of data daily (or maybe even hourly?)
- no doublt there are other similar examples

So buying the Pros brings some more peace of mind and I'm willingly paying its cost.

Cheers