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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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.