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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nandnandnand - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Weren't the first XPoint parts going to be 16-32 GB? I find $0.65/GB hard to believe... I expect $3.00/GB.nathanddrews - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Where are you seeing this and for what format?I strongly suspect that Intel is going to be price competitive in the NVMe space so that's realistic but I'd expect a massive premium for Xpoint in DIMM format when Skylake-E comes around.
shabby - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Why would xpoint dimm be premium priced? They said its slower than dimm, so it should be cheaper.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well what competition would the DIMM format have on SkyLake-E?SATA based SSDs are a dime a dozen and M.2 drives using NVMe are just starting to spread. What competition would Intel have with a DIMM format?
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
There's a lot of pie in the sky dreaming about Xpoint IMO... Why would it be priced at a premium? Same reason M.2 NVMe & PCI-E drives are, it's what the market will bear that counts. If it's any faster it'll be more expensive, simple really.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Don't hold your breath. They made claims of "ram" speed, but demoed 2 GB/s hardware, which is not much faster than nvme SSDs. Ram is 20-30 GB/s...SSDs can still go a long way in terms of bandwidth - just snap more chips on more channels, given an available interface to hook it to, it would be too much trouble for the industry to create something like 8 GB/s SSD. And it only requires a better controller chip, can work with the same old flash memory chips. Currently, M2 can only provide theoretical 4 GB/s bandwidth, running at 32 gbit.
Eden-K121D - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
a PCIe gen4 device could have potential read speeds of 8GB/sKevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The 2 GB/s demo was using a Thunderbolt enclosure and an M.2 prototype.Full size PCIe and DIMM formats are planned so I'd consider that 2 GB demo the starting point.
benedict - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Horrible write endurance. If you need a drive that big you certainly have enough data to fill it 75 times.