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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alacard - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Fascinating stuff, thanks for the in depth analysis.Iketh - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Good read on the software not taking advantage of SSDs yet. Windows is the biggest offender. I have 8 threads and an SSD and I still have to wait for each of my startup programs to load like a snail 1 at a time after bootup...tetsuo77 - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
"There are some drops, although I am not sure what is causing them"It looks suspiciously like your values overflowed an unsigned int (prior to being converted from B to KB). Just add ~4.3 million to the 4 mysteriously low values and you have a nicely shaped curve.
tetsuo77 - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Oops.. I pasted the wrong quote. Meant to quote this: "It looks like read performance scales quite linearly until hitting the IO size of 256KB where RAPID stops caching"I maintain that there is an error in the numbers on the graph :)
Gigaplex - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
32 bit unsigned integers support around 4.3 billion, not million.lyeoh - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
if the values were being stored internally as bytes and not kilobytes it might overflow as tetsuo77 mentioned. 4.3 million * kilobytes per sec = billions of bytes/sec which could overflow.nirwander - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
I cant see how they aim at mainstream with these prices.Crucial MX100 512 is already fast enough for SATA 6 Gbps and.. twice as cheap!
Technology geeks will probaly go for Intel PCIe NVMe drives.
Gigaplex - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
And if you really need the performance, just get two of the MX100s and RAID 0 them.willis936 - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Unless you care about storage latency at all.Gigaplex - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Fair point, but SSDs are so far ahead of hard drives in terms of latency that it hardly matters.