The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The Samsung SATA drives can mostly be distinguished from the other SATA drives by how much of their performance they retain when full; most of the competing drives show a bigger relative drop in average data rate. Between the Samsung drives, the differences are insignificant, and the peak performance of the competitors is pretty close to that of the Samsung drives.

The average and 99th percentile latency scores on the Light test show that most of these SATA drives perform almost identically, but the 860 PROs have smaller full-drive performance hits than the other drives.

The average read latencies on the Light test tend to be a bit lower than the write latencies when the test is run on an empty drive, but when the drives are full, the read latencies climb to be slightly higher than the write latencies. The Samsung SATA SSDs all show smaller performance hits from being full than most of the competing SATA SSDs.

The 99th percentile read latencies are in the 2-3ms range and the 99th percentile write latencies hover right around 3ms. The Crucial drives provide the biggest outliers, but even the 5-6ms response times of the MX300 aren't bad as a worst-case performance measure.

The 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO is once again the most efficient Samsung drive while the 860 PROs  improve upon the poor efficiency of the 850 PROs but don't entirely catch up to the competition.