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.
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Pastuch - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
When will we see Vnand in smart phones? This 16gb Nexus 5 is brutal! Always out of space.ajlueke - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
Page 1, "Scaling below 20nm was seemed", I believe you intended "Scaling below 20nm was seen".Automaticman - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
Can current EVO 840 users upgrade to Magician 4.4 and get the benefits of RAPID 2.0 (assuming they have >16GB DRAM)?bsd228 - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
just as RAPID support was extended to the 840 PRO, I would expect this to support the 840 pro/evo soon, if not right off the bat.Automaticman - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
Well, I was certainly able to upgrade to Magician 4.4, and it did take a couple reboots while it was re-activating RAPID. I am going to guess and say yes it seems to be the new version of RAPID, but I don't see anywhere that it actually says RAPID 2.0 or any indication of how much memory it has available.sirvival - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
Ah ok.When I select the 470 in Bench there is no slumber so I got confused.
Since power cosumption is a big thing in Mobile could you do the following:
Bench the impact on the Battery of a Laptop due to a fast drive.
E.g. drive A is fast but has the downside that it draws more under load as drive B which is slower. But since its done faster it returns to idle faster.
I mean impact on real world scenarios.
Or how much power was used for bench x etc. and have a average per hour or something like that.
sirvival - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
damn this was to be a reply tohttp://www.anandtech.com/comments/8216/samsung-ssd...
sorry
Nickat - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Thank you so much. You explained everything so well.Stokkolm - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Newegg still has them for preorder at the more expensive price, hopefully they drop those before the release date.skarthikeyan - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Hi, How come random read is 106.8MB/sec and random write is 292.4MB/sec for the SSD 850 Pro 256 GB? Aren't writes supposed to be slower than reads?