The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend
by Billy Tallis on January 23, 2018 10:00 AM ESTConclusion
By the numbers, the Samsung 860 PRO is generally the fastest SATA SSD, but the performance doesn't stand out from the crowd. The 860 PRO offers only slight improvements over the performance of the 850 PRO, and the better competing SATA SSDs are now able to perform at or near the level of the Samsung drives. The SATA interface is simply too much of a bottleneck for any SATA drive to distinguish itself with high performance on a broad range of tests. Hitting those limits is now expected from mainstream drives, instead of being an aspirational goal. Which means that while the 860 PRO is launching as the fastest SATA SSD on the market – once again retaining Samsung's traditional dominance of the market – its accomplishments feel mooted by the limitations of the SATA interface and how close the rest of the competition is these days.
The power consumption situation is quite different; there's plenty of room for improvement, and the 860 PRO delivers. The 850 PRO had been looking rather power-hungry lately as other drives approached its performance level without having to sacrifice as much power efficiency. With updated NAND and DRAM and controller, the 860 PRO is much more efficient than the 850 PRO, setting new records on tests where the Samsung drives still rated well, and catching up to most of the competition where the 850 PRO was notably inefficient.
The only aspect in which the Samsung 860 PRO has a clear and large advantage over the competition is the write endurance. The problem is that this does not matter. With the warranty period shortened to 5 years and the rated write endurance increased substantially over the 850 PRO, the 860 PRO's endurance rating comes out to 0.64 drive writes per day. It is genuinely hard to come up with a realistic non-server workload that produces a write volume equivalent to filling the entire drive every business day. Working with uncompressed video can certainly generate the terabytes of data needed to wear down an 860 PRO, but then the SATA bottleneck becomes significant. It may turn out that the only sensible reason to use an 860 PRO would be in a RAID array, and even then enterprise SSDs may offer a better balance of capacity, endurance, per-drive performance and cost.
| SATA SSD Price Comparison | |||||
| 240-275GB | 480-525GB | 960-1050GB | 2TB | 4TB | |
| Samsung 860 PRO (MSRP) | $139.99 (55¢/GB) | $249.99 (49¢/GB) | $479.99 (47¢/GB) | $949.99 (46¢/GB) | $1899.99 (46¢/GB) |
| Samsung 860 EVO (MSRP) | $94.99 (38¢/GB) | $169.99 (34¢/GB) | $329.99 (33¢/GB) | $649.99 (32¢/GB) | $1399.99 (35¢/GB) |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $102.44 (41¢/GB) | $139.99 (28¢/GB) | $299.99 (30¢/GB) | $649.33 (32¢/GB) | $1427.95 (36¢/GB) |
| Samsung 850 PRO | $141.00 (55¢/GB) | $217.99 (43¢/GB) | $429.99 (42¢/GB) | $892.09 (44¢/GB) | |
| Crucial MX500 | $79.99 (32¢/GB) | $134.95 (27¢/GB) | $259.99 (26¢/GB) | $499.99 (25¢/GB) | |
| Crucial BX300 | $87.99 (37¢/GB) | $144.99 (30¢/GB) | |||
| Crucial MX300 | $89.99 (33¢/GB) | $146.99 (28¢/GB) | $267.00 (25¢/GB) | $549.99 (27¢/GB) | |
| SanDisk Ultra 3D | $79.99 (32¢/GB) | $129.99 (26¢/GB) | $249.99 (25¢/GB) | $499.99 (25¢/GB) | |
| WD Blue 3D NAND | $79.99 (32¢/GB) | $139.99 (28¢/GB) | $274.79 (27¢/GB) | $556.00 (28¢/GB) | |
| Toshiba TR200 | $79.99 (33¢/GB) | ||||
| Intel 545s | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $159.99 (31¢/GB) | |||
For more typical desktop and workstation usage patterns, the high endurance ratings of the Samsung 860 PRO are overkill, and so are the smaller ratings on the 860 EVO. Now that said – and least we see the pendulum swing the other way – having drives with plenty of write endurance is by and large a good thing, if only because it provides plenty of headroom for certain workloads and and some additional options on the market. The flip side of that however is that practically speaking, Samsung is offering a benefit that consumers don't need, and charging a substantial premium for it.
Ultimately the Samsung 860 PRO is a commendable technical achievement; Samsung has pushed the SATA III interface to its limit by having it serve such a powerful SSD, and it's entirely possible we won't see a better desktop SATA SSD ever made. But as SSDs get faster and faster and the SATA interface does not, I would argue that the 860 PRO isn't a very good product, at least not for the desktop SSD market of 2018. The market has moved on, and power users and enthusiasts who want something better than a mainstream SSD are all looking for PCIe SSDs. The Samsung 860 PRO is priced like a PCIe SSD, but offers none of the tangible advantages. And with the prices Samsung is planning on charging for the 860 family, I'm worried that at MSRP, even the 860 EVO is likely to be unconvincing.
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WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Impressive drive. We've definitely hit the point where the SATA bottleneck prevents any serious performance improvements. Looks like the 860 EVO nearly matches the PRO's speeds (at least on paper) and costs 33% less at all capacities. It seems like the trend will continue of recommending the latest Samsung EVO drive to anyone who needs a SATA SSD and people with extra money to spend can upgrade to the PRO. Almost no reason to buy any other drives unless you can find them at ridiculous sale prices.generaldwarf - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
the 860 evo is 33% cheaper and 50% less endurant = 860 pro is cheaper on the long runDanNeely - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Unless you're doing insanely high write levels (for anything in the consumer/prosumer space) both drives will probably fail in 5-10 years of old age without coming anywhere near their endurance limits. The pro just has extra overkill on that number.Flunk - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Definitely, for client loads you're not going to hit that write endurance before the drive dies from something else.But if the Samsung 860 PRO dies within 10 years it's still under warranty. I recently had a 4.5 year old Samsung 840 PRO die on me and Samsung shipped me an essentially brand new 850 PRO as a replacement. The EVO comes with a 5 year warranty, which while good, is not as good.
DanNeely - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
The 860pro is down to the same 5 years as the 860 EVO.chrcoluk - Friday, September 6, 2019 - link
My 850 pro almost died at 4 years and 10 months (mirroring your view that a 5 year warranty is pushing it close).Sent to samsung RMA, they ran what was clearly a very basic test only (they completed RMA testing in just 40 mins according to status page) and returned as non faulty.
They returned a drive that was randomly not appearing at post and had corrupted boot files as non faulty. I didnt trust it so put it in a spare rig, installed windows on it, and ran some i/o tests, on the first test it locked up during heavy i/o load. After giving it a while to recover I rebooted and the drive was gone in bios, but this time it hasnt recovered at all now seemingly completely dead.
For the curious the erase cycles are extremely low only 40 or so erase cycles, data written was at over 20TB, nowhere near the 150TB warranty.
Given these figures I would say a higher amount of years on the warranty is far more valuable than a higher TBW limit, so the 860 pro's are a nerf. The fact samsung are no longer willing to offer 10 years on their pro units is quite telling. If the 10 year policy wasnt costing them money then they wouldnt mind doing it, which must mean the failure rate at 4+ years is high enough to warrant the change.
Alistair - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
MX500 is cheaper, performs almost the same. And they actually provide warranty service in Canada properly, unlike Samsung.Check this forum:
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/has-anyone-dealt-s...
Samus - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Yeah, hard to ignore the MX500 and BX300 (if looking for a smaller capacity drive) because they are so easy to find, inexpensive, and the support is solid. I’ve had great luck with crucial/Micron drives, especially models with Marvell controllers, for nearly a decade. I’ll never forget when I installed the C300 in my laptop in 2010, my first experience with 500MB/sec data transfers and 5 second windows startups.Samus - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The long run of what? By the time the drive warranty is up SATA will go the way of PATA/IDE. Does anybody seriously think SATA will be around in 5 years? We already have consumer hard drives bottlenecked by SATA2!smilingcrow - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
I fully expect SATA3 to be still around in 5 years. Hard Drives and even DVDs aren't going away and it would seem pointless to replace SATA for those types of devices as it offers sufficient bandwidth for years to come.