The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on July 11, 2016 10:00 AM ESTATTO
ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.
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The ATTO plot for the 4TB 850 EVO shows no problems and very slightly better read speeds than the 2TB 850 EVO.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.
As expected, the AS-SSD results are unremarkable. Even if the new V-NAND were slower, the 4TB drive has more than enough parallelism to provide peak performance that saturates the SATA link.
Idle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.
We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.
The 4TB EVO has slightly lower idle power consumption than the 2TB EVO, but both still draw twice as much power in the slumber state as the smaller 850 EVOs with the MEX and MGX controllers.
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SetiroN - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I mean I understand and agree that Samsungs are the better drives to buy at lower capacities right now, but if you needed 4TB or more you just have to be silly to spend $700 more.Let me say that again: $700.
Oxford Guy - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
"I can't honestly think of any good reason to buy something other than samsung SSD"1) People who were burned by the very poor steady state performance (according to one professional review site) of the original 840 120 GB.
2) People who were burned by the problems with the 840 EVO and who aren't impressed by the kludgy work-around of re-writing data again and again.
3) People who haven't been impressed with generations of BS power consumption specs. It's only recently that we're now seeing ratings for read/write power consumption. Prior to that, though, there generations/years of Samsung SSDs with ".17 watt" power consumption nonsense. This was not only the only thing on their site for SSDs that used plenty of watts when working (like the 830 and 840) — consumers even advised each other in the comments in places like this to choose Samsung because of the very low power consumption (even though the 840 topped the chart here, as I recall, for consuming the most watts when writing).
But, that said, the 850 seems to be the first decent TLC SSD so I'm glad the company has made significant improvement.
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I guess I got lucky, went straight from 830s to 850 EVOs & SM951, have yet to get burnt. Though to be honest, every other SSD OEM out there (including Intel) had at least one catastrophic scenario like the 840's (often worse, resulting in data loss), if not several such scenarios.I'm not completely excusing Samsung, because their handling of the situation wasn't optimal (went from trying to brush it under that rug to a kludgy fix that didn't even cover the non EVO)... But I'm also not holding it against them.
Palorim12 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
1. They released a fix it a week or two ago.2. completely fixed in April of 2015. Doesn't constantly rewrite data, the new algorithm itself fixes the read speeds and the idle write thing they have is a just in case the algorithm can't fix it.
3. Use desktops, so can't say anything about power consumption.
romrunning - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Sure, the *1TB* Ultra II is cheaper per GB. But show me where I can buy a 4TB Ultra II, and then you'll have an apples-to-apples comparison.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well, you can't, but you can buy 4 1TB, put them in RAID 0 and get 2 GB/sec vs 500 MB/sec from the EVO.So almost the same capacity (it is 960 GB really) at 4 times the speed (and 4 times less reliability ;) for 2/3 of the cost.
quiksilvr - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
That is only a viable option if you have a desktop computer or a Thunderbolt external drive enclosure. An initial price of $1499 is a lot but 4TB is ridiculous. And if that price drops to $999, that would be even more bonkers. I remember the days when having just 1TB was that price. The fact that we are at 4 times the capacity for the same price and WAY better performance is nuts.TemjinGold - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
And 4 times the headaches having to deal with the RAID setup.mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
And the reliability issue of one device failure trashing all the data, though one could get round this by using four 2TB in RAID10 which wouldn't be so bad, but still a lot of ports, etc.Gigaplex - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'd also need a RAID controller with 4 spare SATA ports.