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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with The Destroyer, Samsung's SATA SSDs were still on top before the Samsung 860 PRO arrived. The 860 PRO brings only modest improvements to the average data rates on the Heavy test, and the 512GB models is slightly faster than the 4TB model. The only real outlier here is the Crucial MX300, for its poor performance when the drive is full.
The Samsung MLC SSDs and the SanDisk Ultra 3D offer the best average and 99th percentile scores among the SATA drives, but even the current models from Intel and Crucial are close enough to be indistinguishable without benchmarking tools.
Most of the drives show small differences in average read latency between the full and empty drive test runs, but it's the write latencies that account for the bulk of the delays experienced during this test. The Samsung 860 PROs are among the several drives that show virtually no difference in average write latency when the drive is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores show that most of these SATA SSDs are equally competent at keeping latency under control. As usual, the Crucial MX300's full drive results stand out as particularly bad, and the BX300 is revealed to have a problem with high latency writes whether or not it is full.
The 860 PRO mostly eliminates the gap in power efficiency relative to the modern competitors. The 4TB model requires slightly more power than the 512GB, but is still a substantial improvement over the multi-TB 850s.
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rocky12345 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Great review as always Thank You. I am happy to see my 850 Pro 512GB drive still hanging in there and able to perform with the big guys still in the Sata based drives that is. I am thinking that when I do my whole platform upgrade in the fall of 2018 I will be picking up a Samsung 960 Pro 512GB drive for my new build and most likely keep my current drive in my current system and pass it all on to my wife I am sure she will like the great speed increase going from a 750GB HDD to the Samsung SSD & well all the other goodies in the system as well.WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
If you're building an entire new system in the fall I would seriously recommend moving to a PCIe M.2 drive. The 1TB 960 EVO will blow the 1TB 860 PRO out of the water for the same price. The only trade-off is the shorter warranty (3 years vs 5 years).BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
I would agree with you, except Rocky said he'll be picking up a 960Pro not an 860Pro.lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I weep every time I see those prices... F'ing ridiculous.imaheadcase - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Only after you go over 512gig. These prices are pretty tame compared to when the old version came out without the higher end models. You would be paying $500 for that entry one for 256gig.Considering that most people really don't need more than 512gig or even 256g for the average users its pretty nice price. Media is what takes most space on drives, and most stream it or have on separate drive that is bigger.
lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
It gets on my nerves to see price actually *increase* per GB for the higher capacities instead of the opposite, which seems to be common place among drives from all vendors.I don't know. I still find it hard to justify a "premium" SSD above 512GB, when you'd want the peace of mind, oh well. Feel my pain?
BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
It is especially frustrating to pay more per GB when you see models with the same controller, memory, PCB, and type of NAND chips, but one model has a few more of the NAND chips to get the capacity. Their cost to build (per GB) would come down seeing as they don't need to spend any more on any components except the extra NAND chip. In situations where a different (and low quantity) controller and/or different NAND chips are used, there is some justification, but the premium presented to customers is sometimes disparate to the costs incurred by the manufacturer.Lolimaster - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Since when a simple MLC 4TB is not a mainstream product? That should be the aim for sata SSD's.Now they try to seel you MLC like it was SLC. For less than $1k we get the 2xCrucial MX500 2TB, yeah TLC, but why MLC needs to be that costly...
BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Now that all the other manufacturers have stepped away from MLC, there is both no direct competition and an artificial shortage (or the appearance there of) for people who want MLC. I imagine the MRSP will not stick around for very long if they want to sell these. Unfortunately, I also imagine that they will settle in to the (still high) price bracket that their 850 series counterparts are at now.comma - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Could you clarify what capacities are correlated with what size PCB?Are the 256gb and 512gb pcbs the smaller pcb? The anandtech 850 evo review has a section on "inside the drives" where it compares the pcb sizes to the capacity. If you could add something like that for this review, that would be awesome. Many thanks!