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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rate of the Samsung 860 EVO on the Light test is slightly lower than the 850 EVO, but still definitely within the normal range for this class of drives.
Average and 99th percentile latencies from the 860 EVO on the Light test are about the same as its predecessor and Samsung's other SATA SSDs. The competing SATA drives tend to show a bit higher average latency when the test is run on a full drive.
Average read and write latencies for the 860 EVO are within the normal range, for Samsung's drives. The competing drives from Crucial and SanDisk show larger increases to average read latency when the test is run on a full drive.
Looking at 99th percentile read and write latencies on the Light test, Samsung's drives are generally the least-affected by being full, and the 860 EVO doesn't break that pattern.The SanDisk Ultra 3D has a slightly better 99th percentile write latency than Samsung's SATA drives.
The Samsung 860 EVO shows clear improvement in power consumption over its predecessor, but the Crucial and SanDisk drives are still clearly in the lead over the Samsung drives.
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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.