The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on July 11, 2016 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Destroyer isn't enough to really challenge the 4TB 850 EVO, as this test doesn't write enough data to fill the drive even halfway. The 1TB 850 Pro still holds the record for the highest average data rate maintained by a SATA drive, but the 4TB EVO is closer to that than to any slower drive.
After the 2TB 850 Pro and EVO managed to tie with the top tier of drives for average service time, it is a little disappointing to see the 4TB 850 EVO only manages to match the 1TB models, but that's still high-end performance.
The 4TB 850 EVO has slightly more extreme latency outliers than the 2TB 850s, but at the more strict threshold of 10ms it is tied with the 1TB 850 EVO for being the best TLC drive.
The 4TB 850 EVO brings a little more reduction in power use over the 2TB 850 EVO, which substantially cut power use relative to the 1TB model. The 4TB drive is clearly not paying any significant penalty for keeping so much flash and DRAM powered up.
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JellyRoll - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It is relative. 75 total drive writes of 4TB are huge.Daniel Egger - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Not at all. There're many scenarios where one would chose a larger drive without immediate need. In fact I'd never take a drive I can immediately fill up a 100%, what'd be the point in that? Also this is a consumer drive and how many customers do you know *writing* away TB after TB, many kinds of data are actually write-once-read-often...My laptop SSD has been powered on for pretty much exactly two years now and seen 10TB writes per year. My home VM server sees 9.2 TB writes per year. So pretty much harmless and those two cases are already very much non-consumer scenarios...
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
If you really do a lot of writing, say you work with RAW 4k video, then you really don't care that much about latency, all you care about is bandwidth and capacity. In this case, what you really need is a good RAID controller and a dozen of good old HDDs.vladx - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
This drive is not suited for 4K video work, everyone knows that. Using an EVO for that kind of work iwould be very irresponsible and failure is 100% in the hands of the user .Oxford Guy - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'll agree with you if there is a big red sticker on the box that says that.vladx - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
@Oxford Guy: And this why we get people ranting about SSDs when it's their own fault for being ignorant.Kevin G - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Indeed and at this point you'd want a fast NVMe drive for high quality 4k captures.A 4 TB SATA SSD does have utility as a means to provide storage for an assort of cameras and equipment build around SATA drives. There are a lot of those out there mainly because U.2 hasn't taken hold (yet?).
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Who captures video to PC LOL. Who logs a computer along with a camera.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Some high end cine cameras actually capture straight to SSDImpulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Pretty sure he meant it as in 'working with 4K' anyway.