Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 8, 2014 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 – Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.
Fortunately the 850 EVO does much better in our 2011 Storage Benches, which are more representative of what a typical consumer would subject the drive to. In these tests the 850 EVO is actually more or less a match for the 850 Pro (excluding the 120GB model) and beats pretty much all of its main competitors (namely MX100 and Ultra II).
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Kevin G - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
They do seem a little low but we just got out of a major sale spree. During the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping fest the 480 GB Intel 730 was going for $200. I would have picked up one up myself at that price but they ran out of stock.HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
You'd have been better served with the Sandisk Extreme Pro 480GB for $185.davolfman - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
OCZ's firmware for the Barefoot3 series of chips the ARC100 uses has a less then stellar reputation. Things like unexpected power loss have been known to put it into a state of progressive corruption only recoverable by secure erase. There have been patches that claim to fix this on my Vector (that probably got applied to the ARC out the door), but I haven't seen anyone test if they're working.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
Up to its old tricks, then.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
As listed on the table, the prices were taken on December 7 and were accurate at the time.sheh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Can anyone explain the large discrepancy (not only in this case) in sequential speed between Iometer and AS-SSD?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
It's because of TurboWrite. Iometer is a time based tool and the sequential tests are run for one minute, which means that the TurboWrite buffer will be filled and thus the performance goes down as data is written to the TLC array. AS-SSD, on the other hand, only writes a gigabyte of data so it all gets written to the fast SLC cache.sheh - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Thanks. I'll have to reread older reviews, but I think there's a similar behavior also on other drives that do not have a fast temporary buffer?maecenas - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I saw the 840 EVO 500gb going for $180 over the black Friday - cyber Monday period. It'll interesting to see if Samsung keep the 840 EVO on the market as a the low end, so the 850 EVO can fill the mid-range portion of the market while the 850 Pro serves the high end.Laststop311 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Prices are kinda crappy. Why go with an 850 evo when u can spend 20-30 dollars more and get an 850 pro?