The Latest High-Capacity M.2: The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD, Reviewed
by Billy Tallis on February 14, 2018 1:40 PM 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.
The Samsung 860 EVO's average data rates on the Heavy test are slightly below the 850 EVO, and the full drive and empty drive test runs produced the same average data rate. These regressions still leave the 860 EVO faster than most of its competition, though the Crucial MX500 is clearly faster when the test is run on an empty drive.
The average and 99th percentile latencies of these SATA drives are mostly quite similar. The Crucial MX300 had clear issues when full and the MX500 has slightly higher latency than its competitors, but otherwise the differences are minimal.
As compared with its predecessor, the Samsung 860 EVO shows slightly higher average read latency and slightly lower average write latency. The 860 EVO's scores are all still within the normal range for this product class.
Aside from the Crucial MX300, the 99th percentile write latency scores are all essentially the same for this batch of drives. There's a bit more variation for the 99th percentile read latencies, where the 860 EVO is slightly faster than its predecessor but still not as fast as the current or previous generation MLC drives from Samsung.
The 860 EVO uses less power during the Heavy test than its predecessor, but the improvement isn't enough to catch up to the Crucial and SanDisk drives, which match or beat the 860 PRO's efficiency.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
DanNeely - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
Did you do the performance tests via the sata-m2 adapter too? If so will you be re-running them in PCIe mode next?JanW1 - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
This is a M.2 SATA drive, no point in trying to run tests in PCIe mode.Flunk - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
I can already tell you the results, they're all 0.Drazick - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
M.2 is perfect for Laptop's.Why don't we see U.2 for Desktop's?
It will mitigate most throttling issues.
Not to say simplify the Mother Boards.
CheapSushi - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
There are U.2 for desktops....But U.2 is NVMe/PCIe based. This is SATA/AHCI. You can turn a mini-SAS port and I think U.2 (correct me if wrong) into a quad SATA port with appropriate cable. Nothing wrong with SATA/AHCI for a bulk storage drive. Unless you'e assuming everyone just wants ONE drive for the entire system.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
In a system you would want to use the U.2 port in, there is a decent probability that a second drive will be desired if not already present. Like you said, "Nothing wrong with SATA/AHCI for a bulk storage drive". For systems that you can rule out a bulk storage drive, there is a high probability that nVME needs will be served by M.2 rather than U.2.Though some can tell a difference, it is not even certain that most perceive the performance benefit moving from a fast SATA SSD to an nVME SSD for a primary disk due to how current operating systems handle the storage subsystem.
Bulat Ziganshin - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
3dnews.ru testing shown that 512 GB model sometimes is slower than 850EVO, due to lower parallelism. It's why Samsung sent you 2TB model for tests insteadyankeeDDL - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
Why was the 960 EVO/PRO not included?SpaceRanger - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
Because this is a SATA drive, not an NVME drive.Flunk - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
As such they utterly destroy this.