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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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
"Are the 256gb and 512gb pcbs the smaller pcb?"Correct. The small PCB shots are the 512GB drive, and the large PCB shots are the 4TB drive.
comma - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Awesome. Thanks for continuing to take apart the drives and showing us the innards :Dwill2 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
You included some data on the EVO 860 but no consumption figures ! As the EVO 860 otherwise appears the more cost-effective than the Pro, any chance of adding the 2 Idle figures and the power efficiency for the EVO 860 ?cfenton - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
At this point, I usually recommend whichever drive from a major manufacturer has the lowest $/GB. It's been a while since that was a Samsung drive. I would be astonished if anyone could tell the difference between an 860 Evo and an MX500 in typical client usage, so I don't think it makes much sense to buy the more expensive drive. I'm sure there is a small market that, for some reason, needs the fastest and most durable SATA drives possible, but it's unnecessary for most people.Magichands8 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
What a joke. Another SSD release crippled with the SATA interface? CHECK. Another SSD offered at the ridiculous $0.50/GB price point? CHECK. Another SSD with woefully low storage capacity? CHECK. Another customer convinced to avoid buying their SSDs? CHECK. Now my money isn't going anywhere near one of these so I admit I didn't read the whole article but just from reading some of the comments it appears that Samsung also managed to reduce both durability AND warranty coverage for this tripe. Samsung's really on a role these days. It's not all bad though, apparently someone in their corporate structure has been using their brains as Samsung has managed to avoid the M.2 format for each of these offerings. What they should have done in addition to giving buyers that special feeling of owning an SSD with the letters "PRO" on it is wrap the drives with flashing multicolored LEDs so the kids can really get their bling bling on! Samsung is definitely taking on 2018 by storm!Round - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
While I agree with most of what you just said, I disagree on SATA. I think SATA drives are great for 90%+ of the population. They work everywhere, they're cheaper, and besides running some fake bench mark tests and moving files on the drive, they give people the same feel/real world performance.NVME is the real rip off in SSDs IMO. Same memory, same format for M.2 SATA/NVME, different controller, but the NVME is significantly more expensive. Why charge so much? No reason other than they can get away with it.
Magichands8 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Anyone moving around any data over a couple hundred MB will notice the difference IMMEDIATELY. And there is absolutely, positively, no excuse whatsoever for hogtying a storage technology NATIVELY capable of vastly better performance. The "it's good enough" argument doesn't work any better for SATA vs. PCIE than it did for HDD vs. SSD. We all moved from 32 bit to 64 bit, from HHD to SSD and now we are able to move from SATA to PCIE because the technology for the latter is here, it's present and it has, literally, made SATA obsolete.chrcoluk - Friday, April 12, 2019 - link
if you think sata is obsolete then I assume you dont use netflix, youtube, and other mainstream media services as these services run of spindles not flash storage, the reason been flash storage cannot compete on capacity.For a home user nvme offers little benefit vs sata for ssd's, for a datacentre user, its good for performance sensitive loads such as database caching, but doesnt shine in raw storage capacity.
SATA as long as its good enough for spindles will survive.
For NVME to wipe out SATA ssd's the pricing needs to be improved to match SATA pricing, in addition m.2 form factor is a step backwards, board manufacturers are struggling to fit even only 2 slots per board, and they are a pain to install vs simply slotting in a sata drive into a drive bay.
How often do people move enough data around that the performance of nvme really matters? Most of my writes to my ssd are me downloading games, and the bottleneck in that case is the speed of my internet.
NVME is faster but thats its only win at the moment, it loses on many other things, and because of that SATA is not obsolete.
overseer - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
My Intel X25-M was bought before wedding and it still has 90+% writes left. Guess I may pass it to my grandson...Hixbot - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
What is with the PM981 idle wake up latency. Almost 8 seconds to wake up?!