Samsung SSD 850 Pro (128GB, 256GB & 1TB) Review: Enter the 3D Era
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2014 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based - we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Thanks to the excellent IO consistency, the 850 Pro dominates our 2013 Storage Bench. At the 1TB capacity point, the 850 Pro is over 15% faster than any drive when looking at the average data rate. That is huge because the 850 Pro has less over-provisioning than most of today's high-end drives and the 2013 Storage Bench tends to reward drives that have more over-provisioning because it essentially pushes drives to steady-state. The 256GB model does not do as well as the 1TB one but it is still one of the fastest drives in its class. I wonder if the lesser amount of over-provisioning is the reason or perhaps the Extreme Pro is just so well optimized for mixed workloads.
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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
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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