Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 8, 2014 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The 850 EVO is yet another showcase of Samsung's engineering talent and truth to be told there is a lot of good in the 850 EVO. By combining TLC with V-NAND technology, Samsung is eliminating any and all concerns that people might have had about the endurance of TLC NAND and to back that up Samsung is rating the 850 EVO's endurance higher than the MLC drives of most manufacturers. I never considered the endurance of TLC NAND to be an issue for average client workloads, but I saw many people who were doubtful about the sufficiency of 1,000 P/E cycles, so with twice that in TLC V-NAND I believe many will and should stop treating TLC as a second class citizen.
Not only is the endurance higher, but the 850 EVO's performance is also better compared to its predecessor. In our 2011 Storage Benches the 850 EVO matches up with the 850 Pro and is hence one of the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSDs for typical client workloads. In very heavy workloads, illustrated by our 2013 Storage Bench, the 850 EVO does okay, but it's clear that it's outperformed by drives that are more optimized for such usage.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (12/7/2014) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO (MSRP) | $100 | $150 | $270 | $500 |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro | $105 | $180 | $320 | $630 |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $85 | $125 | $230 | $440 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | - | $150 | $328 | $531 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $80 | $110 | $220 | $420 |
| Crucial MX100 | $70 | $113 | $215 | - |
| Crucial M550 | $85 | $163 | $265 | $450 |
| Plextor M6S | $80 | $158 | $290 | - |
| Intel SSD 730 | - | $130 | $220 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $75 | $130 | $240 | - |
| OCZ ARC 100 | $70 | $100 | $215 | - |
There is one huge 'but' however – the price. The 850 EVO is a very competitive drive in performance and features, but neither of these warrants the premium Samsung is charging. As I've said before, there are only two main segments in the SSD market that I recognize, which are the value/mainstream and high-end/enthusiast segments.
For the value segment, the key consideration is the price because these are typically users who don't push their systems to the limits and thus shouldn't pay a premium for a performance increase that is likely to be negligible for their usage. Our Light Workload suite highlights this pretty well because the difference between most drives is on the order of 10-20% and while a possible 10% increase in performance would be worth $5, $10 and maybe even $20 to some users, it's definitely not worth the ~$50 Samsung is charging for the 850 EVO over Crucial's MX100 and SanDisk's Ultra II for example.
As for the high-end segment, Samsung already has that one covered by the 850 Pro. The 850 EVO, especially at the smaller capacities, isn't fast enough under IO intensive workloads to really compete with the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro. Given that the Extreme Pro can be had for about the same cost (depending on the capacity, of course), I would much rather have that if I was looking for a high-end SSD.
In other words, the 850 EVO falls into the infamous middle-class. It doesn't have an obvious niche in the market because it's too expensive for the value-oriented buyer and it's not fast enough to be considered as a competitive high-end SSD. If Samsung shaved $30 to $50 off the price, the 850 EVO would be competitive against the other value drives because the five-year warranty and Samsung's top-of-the-class software suite add some value, but with the current pricing there are just better options on the market.
A part of me sees that it might have been worthwhile for Samsung to do one more planar NAND shrink to be more competitive in the mainstream segment because right now the 850 EVO is missing that market. While 3D NAND will eventually become more cost efficient as the number of layers increases, we are not there yet. I absolutely love all the performance and endurance benefits V-NAND is bringing to the table, but if the 850 EVO can't even compete with MLC drives in price, that's a bit alarming.
There is still hope that the MSRPs are just conservative and street prices could end up lower. If they don't, while the 850 EVO is clearly the best performing "value" drive, it likely won't see the same sort of success as its predecessor. Samsung also has a strong presence in the OEM desktop and laptop markets, but OEMs may not see enough to sway them over from the 840 EVO if prices are quite a bit higher.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
97 Comments
View All Comments
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.