Samsung SSD 850 Pro (128GB, 256GB & 1TB) Review: Enter the 3D Era
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2014 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Samsung does not cease to amaze me with their SSDs as the 850 Pro just kills it in every aspect. The performance is there. The endurance is the best of the class. Heck, even Samsung's feature and software suites beat the competition by a mile. To be honest, there is not a single thing missing in the 850 Pro because regardless of the angle you look at the drive from, it it will still top the charts.
Samsung's heavy investment on NAND R&D and specifically 3D NAND is really paying off in the 850 Pro. Thanks to the more efficient structure of 3D NAND, Samsung has been able to improve all three main aspects of NAND i.e. performance, endurance and power consumption. It will be very hard for anyone to compete with the 850 Pro as the characteristics of V-NAND are superior compared to 2D NAND. The density is also very competitive against the smallest 2D NAND nodes, meaning that V-NAND should not carry a hefty premium over MLC.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (6/28/2014) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/256GB | 480/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro (MSRP) | $130 | $200 | $400 | $700 |
| Samsung SSD 840 Pro | $120 | $190 | $401 | - |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $80 | $140 | $240 | $420 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | - | $200 | $370 | $600 |
| SanDisk Extreme II | $80 | $150 | $260 | - |
| Crucial MX100 | $75 | $110 | $210 | - |
| Crucial M550 | $104 | $157 | $280 | $491 |
| Plextor M6S | $100 | $145 | $400 | - |
| Intel SSD 730 | - | $270 | $500 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $94 | $165 | $330 | - |
| OCZ Vector 150 | $115 | $190 | $370 | - |
Update: Samsung just provided us the updated MSRPs, which I have added to the table. The old MSRPs were $230 for 256GB, $430 for 512GB and $730 for the 1TB capacity. This certainly makes the 850 Pro more price competitive with the Extreme Pro, although the 1TB drive is still $100 more.
The MSRPs, on the other hand, are a bit of a letdown. I was hoping that Samsung would have priced the 850 Pro more aggressively because now they are asking anywhere between $30 and $130 more than what SanDisk is charging for the Extreme Pro. The 850 Pro is certainly a better drive in all areas but forking over up to $130 more for one can be difficult to justify. Of course, as with all MSRPs, they should be taken with a grain of salt and I certainly hope that the actual street prices end up being closer to the Extreme Pro ones the 850 Pro becomes available in the next few weeks.
If you are looking for a SATA 6Gbps drive and want the absolute best, the 850 Pro is your pick. It is without a doubt the best drive in the market as long as you are able to justify the price premium over other options.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
160 Comments
View All Comments
Cerb - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
As soon as it is cheap enough. But, don't get your hopes up about performance. SD cards are mostly limited by the controllers being slow, and in the tiny package they fit in, with the narrow margins they have, there's not a lot of room, physically and economically, to give them fast controllers, even if you get a big one that must have several NAND dies, and are talking about full-size SD, where multiple channels might be viable. It sucks, and I dislike shopping for SD cards as much as anybody, but today, that's how it is.frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
I think he was talking about V-NAND (3D cells) which is independent of the controller.I would guess it will, as density will continue to scale up which will make it the cheaper technology.
It is cutting edge now, but will let Samsung scale higher densities very aggressively in the coming years, replacing all their 2D NAND production (they announced it when presenting the 3D cells).
Harry Lloyd - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Personally I have no interest in this kind of performance, and I really hope they focus on reducing prices and increasing capacities. The MX100 is just great for home usage (system and gaming), and I would like to see a 512 GB equivalent for around 100 $ by the end of 2015.Spatty - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
"Oftentimes when cell size is discussed, it is only the actual size of the cell that is taken into account, which leaves the distance between cells out of the conclusion."Incorrect. Oftentimes what is being discussed is the half pitch. The 16nm, 19nm, 20nm, etc of the die. That is not the cell. The cell is Always defined as the repeatable structure in a memory device, and this includes the space between cells as described. The cell size is incorrectly referenced as being the half pitch.
Then there is marketing gimmick by companies who call their products 19nm when it is really 19nm by 2xnm. A rectangle and not a true 19nm square half pitch.
Larry Endomorph - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Good review. Bad charts. All of these are useless to color blind people:http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/NAND%20overv...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/cell%20inter...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/V-NAND_1.png
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8216/850%20Pro%20...
Cerb - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
I never paid much attention, but you're right. If they changed the point shapes, and maybe dashed a couple of the lines, they could take care of that easily.fokka - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
it's great to see a new drive from samsung and even greater seeing them advancing ssd tech and performance in such substantial ways. keeping that in mind i'm not really surprised about the msrp sammy is asking for its drives. and as always when new devices hit the scene, we're comparing msrp with real market prices here, so the difference should be a bit lower in a couple weeks when enough stock is available.that said, even if sata3 remains the most important storage interface today, it's kind of a shame seeing such a beautiful drive limited by this "old" interface. i know the new standards like m2, sata3.2 and pci-e-drives are still kind of a mess, but we already saw what higher throughputs in combination with more efficient interface protocols can do and seeing an expensive enthusiast drive like the 850 pro connected to sata3 just makes it seem more limited than it needed to be.
all that said, it doesn't change much for the average user, or advanced users even, since for most people a good sized evo or crucial is all they ever need in the years to come. upgrading to expensive drives like the 850 will only make sense for the most demanding users, for the rest it will only get interesting again when pci based storage gets more affordable.
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Minor nit: There's no such thing as "pentalobe torx" it's either one or the other but I'm guessing that it might have been torx security since pentalobe screws have only been used by Apple a couple of years back.iwod - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Its great to see its doing well in power consumption area. Which is important in Notebook. I hope we could bring this down to 2W or even 1.5W during operation.I really do think our SSD storage tier deserve a PCI-E lane direct from CPU. It would be great if the market just settle on 2x PCI-E 3.0 from CPU. We get 2GB/s out of it. That is plenty of headroom to grow until we move to PCI-E 4.0
hojnikb - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Thats what sata-express is doing