The Latest High-Capacity M.2: The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD, Reviewed

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB matches the performance of the 4TB 860 PRO. Both of the new generation drives offer small improvements to the average data rate on The Destroyer—enough to secure Samsung's position at the top of the SATA SSD market, but not enough for 850 PRO or EVO owners to have reason to upgrade.

The 860 EVO provides small improvements to both average and 99th percentile latency. The SanDisk Ultra 3D keeps Samsung's drives from being the clear winners by this metric.

The generational improvements from the 860 EVO are similar for both average read and average write latency. The SanDisk Ultra 3D has a clear advantage for average write latency, but otherwise the current-generation drives with 64L 3D NAND have very similar latency.

The 860 EVO improves both 99th percentile read and write latency, and by a larger amount than average latencies improved.

The power consumption of the 860 EVO is much lower than the 850 EVO and is competitive with the latest drives from Crucial and SanDisk, but isn't a match for the 860 PRO. (The 860 EVO's score here is handicapped by the voltage regulation of our SATA to M.2 converter, and the 1TB Crucial and SanDisk drives have less memory to be powering during the test.)