The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on July 11, 2016 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The 4TB Samsung 850 EVO set new highs for a few performance sub-tests, but ultimately the only important record it breaks is for its storage capacity. On that front it is without equal in the consumer market and even among enterprise SATA drives higher capacities are only available from drives that are more than 7mm thick.
Samsung's new 256Gb 48-layer V-NAND chips made it straightforward for them to create this product, but it doesn't quite seem necessary. We were already quite impressed with their 2TB drives, and they still don't face any serious competition. The 4TB 850 EVO is a stark illustration of Samsung's seemingly insurmountable lead in the marketplace, but it is far too expensive for any ordinary desktop or NAS use. There simply aren't many consumers who can afford this much SSD, but if you're a consumer with the budget for 4TB of SSD storage the 850 EVO can deliver it in a single 2.5" drive with none of the complexity of RAID. The drive may also be very welcome in the professional video space, but the relatively low write endurance rating of 300TB (75 total drive writes) could scare off those customers.
Putting aside the concerns about the suitability of this drive for today's market, it is a good sign for the future. Samsung is finally putting their new generation of 3D NAND on shelves in large quantities. As promised it doesn't seem to bring any new performance issues, but a SATA drive can't really prove that conclusively. The improvements to power efficiency are modest but real and every bit of that will be welcome as the 48-layer V-NAND finds its way into the rest of the product line. It is hard to tell whether the new V-NAND will be pushing prices much lower in the short term, but it looks like it will at least be competitive with what's already out there. Samsung is well positioned to continue their dominance for another round.
The 4TB 850 EVO also gives us another light push towards a future where mechanical hard drives are gone from the consumer market. Building a SSD that can entirely displace hard drives is now possible using controllers and DRAM that are cheap commodity parts. (SSDs larger than 4TB could be made using two controllers plus a RAID controller at the cost of some peak performance, a technique used by drives like the 2TB Mushkin Reactor TC.) The per-GB price of NAND flash is the only front on which SSDs still need to improve; SSDs have far surpassed mechanical hard drives in performance and power consumption and have caught up in terms of capacity and density.
The performance of the 4TB 850 EVO also makes it clear that there is even less need for a 4TB 850 Pro. An MLC counterpart simply isn't needed to reach the highest speeds that can be expected of a SATA drive, because 3D TLC drive done right and in such abundant capacity is plenty fast. The only reason Samsung should bother shipping a 4TB 850 Pro is if they're going to give it a vastly higher write endurance rating for a small price premium. Otherwise, they should save that new 3D MLC for the PCIe drives.
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jardows2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
What is the use case for this drive? $1500 for mass storage? Price per GB may be comparable to smaller drives, but that is still a huge chunk of change to get, what?It's a consumer drive, not an Enterprise drive. Video and Photo editors are going to hit it hard, so the lower endurance rating is going to hurt it for use in those applications. All I can see is that it is a halo product to push the industry forward, purchased only by those who have lots of spare cash to spend. Am I missing something?
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
RAW photos, audio, video, basically any kind of data acquisition - those eat a lot of capacity. At 1500$ I'd argue this is not a consumer but a prosumer product.vladx - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
This type of product is for people rich enough to not care about the price. Simple as that.MScrip - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'd say video editing. It's not uncommon to come home with a terabyte of footage from multiple 4K cameras over multiple days of shooting. And you may be editing multiple projects at a time.This would make a hell of a media drive... fast and local.
And when you're done with the projects... you move them to slower mass storage for safekeeping.
jardows2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
My point being, if you are a hobbyist, $1500 is a huge entry point, especially when the, albeit slow, hard drives come in a just a couple hundred dollars.If you are a professional, you are going to want Enterprise level drives with the endurance and warranty support. But if you are using multiple cameras shooting 4K footage, you probably have so much invested there, that $1500 for a storage drive isn't a huge percentage of the overall equipment budget. For me, I'm just using a 1080p camcorder for now, so my budget is way lower!
MScrip - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'm mostly 1080p... with occasional 4K. I don't need this 4TB drive... but I've got my eye on the 1TB version. Right now I'm editing on a 1TB WD Black... and its slowness shows!Is $1500 expensive? It depends. It's just a bigger version of the 2TB model... which is a bigger version of the 1TB model... etc.
Drives in higher capacities always cost more money... especially the first of its kind (4TB in a single SSD)
Asking "who is this for?" is usually a difficult question. My best guess... I'd say it's for someone who wants a single SSD... but needs to hold more than 2TB. :)
Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Moved to 2x 1TB 850 EVOs myself a while back (with an SM951 256GB for OS/apps), can't wait until the higher capacities come down in price... Depending on how much of a premium the 4TB sustains over time I could see myself adding one (or two) 2TB or just going straight to 4TB.Mostly working with 1080p and relatively small 16MP RAWs... Bought the 1TB before the 2TB was readily available but I don't really regret that bit, higher seqs when going to the SM951 and easier to repurpose them later on.
Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
One use case, which is admittedly niche: musicians using virtual instruments.Instrument sample libraries can run into the multi-gigabyte range (have ~2gb in total myself, and I'm only a hobbyist), and are built up of recordings of instruments playing single notes in various volumes, styles, etc., depending on the library's level of detail sometimes recordings of the transitions between notes.
Less detailed virtual instruments may only eat up a few hundred MB in samples; it's not a huge deal to load the entire thing into memory for those. However, more detailed ones can run in the tens of GB's per instrument for all the different layers, and once you start building up an entire virtual orchestra, you will have to resort to loading them from the disk during playback, and for that you require something with low latency and high throughput... hence the use of SSD's. Don't even need the write endurance in a case like this, even.
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Nah, you really want samples loaded in RAM. RAM is cheap, even a modest DAW system will have at least 16 gigs of ram. Latency really matters here, and RAM latency is much, much lower than SSD, and sample libraries aren't that big. Sure, there are a few libraries in excess of 30 GB, but you really use a much smaller subset of the whole thing at a time.Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
It really depends on which sample libraries you're using, and some of the big ones get quite huge. The (perhaps now mere) 32gb RAM on my system only can hold so much, especially with some of the big EastWest libraries.The other advantage of course, is that I can load my entire template in a matter of a couple of minutes instead of waiting 15 minutes for it to load off a regular HDD.