The 2TB Samsung 850 Pro & EVO SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on July 23, 2015 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The 850 Pro and EVO are undoubtedly the best SATA 6Gbps SSDs on the market. The Pro has been holding the performance crown for the past year and it's starting to look like no SATA drive can dethrone it, whereas the EVO provides very competitive performance at a much more affordable price point. From a performance standpoint, the 2TB models leave the Pro and EVO lines unchanged as the performance matches with the 1TB models already on the market. That's hardly a surprise given that the 1TB models saturate the SATA 6Gbps interface and AHCI presents its own limitations, so the 2TB SKUs are solely a capacity bump. There are minor performance differences in steady-state 4KB random write and random read benchmarks that favor the 1TB models, but to be honest that's merely an architectural observation (the internal SRAM caches in the controller may need upgrading to extract better performance out of +1TB of NAND) because the impact on actual user performance is in the order of a few percent.
I'm very glad to see improved power efficiency in the 2TB models. A part of that is explained by the move from LPDDR2 to LPDDR3, but it's also possible that the MHX is manufactured using a more power efficient process node. Depending on the benchmark the power savings can be anywhere from 5% to close to 20%, so it's not a marginal gain especially because higher capacity SSDs usually consume more power due to the additional NAND. The 850 EVO in particular wasn't very power efficient before, but the new 2TB is mostly on par with the 1TB-class drives we have tested. It's no challenger to the BX100 though, but TLC is inherently less power efficient and the SM2246EN controller is also less powerful by being a single-core design while the MHX consists of three processor cores.
At $800, the 2TB 850 EVO is very reasonably priced. The average going price for a 1TB-class value SSD is about $350-$380 with an occasional sale bringing the price closer to $300, so the 2TB EVO carries a small premium, but at $0.40 per gigabyte it's not overpriced by any means. The $1000 2TB Pro on the other hand has a much tinier niche because unless you have a The Destroyer level workload there won't be any difference in performance. Even under such an intensive IO workload the Pro only has a ~10% advantage, but the Pro is overall a little (~5-10%) more power efficient, so if you need a 2TB SSD and value every extra minute of battery life high, the $200 premium might be justifiable. The Pro also carries twice the endurance (300TB vs 150TB) and warranty (10 vs 5 years), but I don't consider those two having much value given that 150TB already translates to 82GB a day for five years and in five years time a SATA 6Gbps drive will most likely be obsolete anyway.
Since the 850 Pro and EVO are the first 2TB client SSDs on the market so they face no competition. They receive a strong recommendation from us for those who need/want a 2TB SSD. Both have excellent performance like the 1TB models we had already tested and the increased power efficiency is a welcome addition for mobile users. Out of the two the EVO is better value for the vast majority, but the 2TB Pro is there for those who want the added endurance and the most impressive SATA SSD in the market.
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leexgx - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
with the 2TB drive they should be good up to 2-6PB of written data at least (the 150-300TB is for warranty purpose past that they will not cover it) the Pro drive would be recommended if you know you're going to be doing lots of writes as tends to keep on going till it fails with 0 errors (EVO does not bold as well under mass data loads when exceeding its endurance spec)Topweasel - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
In the worst case at 14nm with the 840 Pro they saw ~800TB of writing before they acted up. They should easily see more than that with 40nm MLC 3d nand. 300TB is great way to to beat everyone else at the warranted writes and still only offer a warranty that covers 10% on the low of its projected use allowance. The 2 TB version is probably good for damn near 10 PB of writes (could be a lot more not using a calculator to figure out its true longevity).fokka - Saturday, July 25, 2015 - link
since your average modern ssd will manage much more than 300tb anyways, upping the (guaranteed) durability from 150 to 300tb doesn't really take much and might as well be considered a marketing move. not that it's a bad development.Ubercake - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Even without the 3D V-NAND tech, when Samsung upped the warranty to five years on their 850 EVOs (compared to 3-years on the 840 EVOs) and still kept prices competitive, I was sold on their drives. If a company backs any of this PC tech for five years (and even 10 years on the 850 PRO series!) or more, their on the short list for any of my builds.colinstu - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
the length of their warranties sold me too. I've been recommending them to friends to. One of those friend's 840 Pro however has been having some problems, attempting to do an RMA, Samsung only said they'd send out a refurbished drive (and never an upgraded model). This has put quite a sour taste in my mouth with Samsung (sadly). I don't know if Intel or others are any better with their RMA SSDs, but I sure hope so.hansmuff - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
It's common practice to send out refurbs for RMA replacement. For items under 30 days old, sometimes you can get a new replacement, depends on the manufacturer.What do you mean by upgraded model? Did he want an 850Pro for his 840 or something?
sustainednotburst - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
did a RMA recently and in the email there was a notice that said they give New units within 90 days of purchase as long as you provide the proof of purchase.BillyONeal - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
To be fair, SanDisk did the 10 years thing first on the Extreme Pro; Samsung may just be responding to that. The number of drives returned for warranty, even among drives that actually fail, is likely extremely low.Impulses - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Hmm, already got a 1TB EVO... Chances are I'll find a better deal (GB/$) on a second one by the end of this year than on the 2TB. I wish these had been out for a while already, if it were $700 or less already I would've picked one up instead of the 1TB I got recently (for $340). Trying to ditch HDD for anything but backups, but it'll come down to how much storage my photography ends up gobbling thru the year.melgross - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
The article is wrong about 1TB drives not being around at $1,000 and above. There were plenty of those drives.