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

AnandTech 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.