The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend
by Billy Tallis on January 23, 2018 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, 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. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
Samsung's dominance of this test wasn't being seriously challenged, but the 512GB 860 PRO does show improvement to the average data rate on The Destroyer, putting it up in the range of Samsung's multi-TB SATA drives. It's a small change, but SATA doesn't leave room for big gains.
The good average and 99th percentile latency scores of the SanDisk Ultra 3D match or beat the best scores from the Samsung SATA drives. The 512GB 860 PRO shows substantial improvement in 99th percentile latency and more modest gains in average latency, relative to the 850 PRO.
The Samsung 860 PROs show the best average read latencies in their respective product classes, but the SanDisk Ultra 3D isn't far behind. For average write latencies, the Ultra 3D takes a clear lead over the Samsung drives, and the Crucial BX300 is ahead of the Samsung drives by a hair.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 860 PRO show substantial improvements at 512GB, and smaller improvements among the multi-TB drives.
While the 4TB 860 PRO performed better on The Destroyer than the 512GB model by every measure, the 512GB model was more power efficient, and sets a new record for its class. The improvements relative to the 850 PRO are remarkable: the old 512GB 850 PRO required 60% more energy to complete The Destroyer than the new 512GB 860 PRO. Samsung has caught up with the modern competitors in terms of energy efficiency.
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Flunk - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I agree, the low price makes the mx500 a really good buy. It certainly qualifies as "fast enough" while delivering very low cost/GB.GreenMeters - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Looking like it. The 850 EVO was on sale over Black Friday for less than the MX500 (at 1 TB size anyway), but outside big discounts like that (and assuming there's no simultaneous discount of the MX500) then it looks like Samsung is about to be irrelevant when it comes to SATA. Disappointing in some ways (have four 850 EVOs in various systems now, two of them picked up at the aforementioned sale, and they've been great) but as long as PCI is becoming more affordable I guess it's not a big deal.Alistair - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
You are comparing with the launch price of the MX500. I've bought 5 x MX500 1TB drives for $242 USD each. I'm pretty sure the Samsung 850 is more expensive.Samus - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
If you are going to compare sale prices of Samsung drives to the competition, it becomes even more obvious Samsung is a bad buy when you see the sale prices of competitors. The BX300 256GB drives were on sale for $70 at one point. No Samsung 250GB drive has been under $90 in over a year, even on sale.bug77 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
SATA does not prevent performance improvements. 4k random reads are what give a drive its speed for home usage and we're not even at 100MB/s in this aspect. Plenty of room for improvement right there.In other news, if you have ~$250 to spend, you can either get a 512GB 850 Pro or a 1TB MX500. Imho, as good as Samsung is, there's no contest here.
zodiacfml - Sunday, February 11, 2018 - link
I agree. The only limit is in sequential. However, we have seen the performance/capabilities of the Intel Optane drives and that even that doesn't improve a desktop experience by any noticeable level.Round - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Sorry, but I disagree. What's so impressive about this, because I'm not seeing it? They improved the power spec, but for real world use, especially in a desktop, I'm just not seeing any benefit at those prices.I can't see buying any more Samsung drives (I have 6 850 Evos) or recommending them to anyone. The price/performance from Crucial is superior, and I doubt anyone is ever going to notice a performance difference between the MX500 and 850/860 Evos (the 860 Pro is priced ridiculously high and is not a wise purchase for any average user).
I find myself hoping Samsung gets punished in the market place....
StrangerGuy - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Yup, I fail to see whats so great about this SSD either for consumers either. MX500 beats it in 4K random IOPS while having a much higher GB/$. The extra endurance and warranty length is also completely irrelevant for 99.99% of consumers out there; I myself have a Crucial M550 1TB since 2014 and I still only have 11TB total writes on it.BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
While I don't find this drive particularly impressive (not much room to impress on SATA anymore), it does have the distinction of likely being the last MLC drive available on SATA. While normal consumers can (in theory) use TLC drive with no negative effect, there are cases of people who have experienced a TLC SSD failure and aren't too eager to get another. I've personally been involved with 7 TLC SSD failures (3 different Crucial models, 2 Sandisks, and 2 Samsung). While the NAND was not likely responsible for any of these failures and this makes up a pretty low percentage of total TLC SSDs deployed within my purview, it does start to leave a less reliable image when compared to the zero MLC SSD failures (Crucial, Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Corsair, etc.) I've seen in my client base. Granted, this is all anecdotal and I use global data (including HDD vs SSD failure rates) to color my recommendations. However, clients who've experienced the drive failures have universally decided that TLC was not an option for them. I haven't sworn off TLC drives personally, but entirely coincidentally, I have yet to purchase one since I burnt one out under heavy load (improper cooling on the controller I believe).chrone - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Could you guys perform synchronous write test in Linux as well?```
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=4K count=100 oflag=direct,sync status=progress
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=4M count=100 oflag=direct,sync status=progress
```
Sadly, the synchronous write for older Samsung SSD 850 Pro is similar to HDD. Synchronous write are used by OS and app for data consistency and reliability in Linux environment.