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
frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
the 3D structure and design are revolutionary, but the manufacturing technology is actually a very mature one (40nm). This makes it *MUCH* cheaper than the 1X used by their competition.Samsung has really struck gold with that design, as it allows them to scale in both dimensions, depending on the result and cost of each. While 2D NAND is facing really tough challenges to increase density, V-NAND is allowed to either scale up (more layers) or restart scaling pitch, as manufacturing is *very well* understood from 40nm->~16nm. They just need to experiment with it and see what makes economic sense and good trade-offs.
toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Almost seems like it would be cheaper to ramp up the production of silicon ingots and drive that cost down further than the r&d for this.frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Silicon ingots cost is marginal. The real cost for scaling is all the R&D necessary to make the pitch smaller. Even using bigger wafers (current ones are 300mm, there have been talks of 450mm for a while, but cost is a deterrent, as a whole fab needs to be re-tooled for the upgrade) only improves yields and costs marginally.NAND scaling down is facing huge challenges, due both to process (who to image those ~15nm line on a wafer) and electrical limits (~3 electrons inside your cell at 15nm). 3D NAND allows to restart the growth by bypassing those challenges (step back to 40nm process and scale in the Z axis).
General SOCs are facing similar process limits (there is no solution below 10nm so far, despite the whole industry cooperating to find one), even if their design limits are more relaxed (SOCs are not trapping charges, but cross talk and interference are starting to be challenges too).
UltraWide - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Will there be a version with PCIe or M.2?Gigaplex - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
If you'd read the article, you'd know the controller doesn't support PCIe.Gigaplex - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
"This further suggests that the issue lies in our tests instead of the RAPID software itself as end-users will always run the drive with a partition anyway."Um, no. I don't care what the end user does, the software shouldn't cause a BSOD. If it can't cache without a partition, it should simply not attempt to cache. This is just a case of Samsung thinking that just because they do some nice hardware, that they're experts in software. They're really not. RAM caching of I/O isn't specific to SSDs anyway, why are they tying it to an SSD launch?
Donuts123 - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
Yeah, that's a huge red flag for me, I definitely wouldn't use the RAPID software. Another layer to go wrong (and apparently it does). I hope Anandtech submits details of the BSODs they saw to Samsung.RAPID probably just uses the Samsung SSD as a dongle. Presumably RAPID is derived from Samsung's acquisition of NVELO, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/6518/samsung-acquire...
Guspaz - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Wait a minute, 150TB endurance on a 1TB drive? Only 150 cycles? That doesn't make any sense, that's absurdly low.Then again, Intel's rating for the 335 doesn't make any sense either. They say 20GB a day for 3 years, or about 22TB... But they also rate it for 3000 cycles, and the media wear indicator on the drive is set to treat 3000 as full wear, and that represents 720TB...
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
The endurance figures are usually based on a 4KB random write workload and are thus worst-case numbers. 150TB of random writes means a ton of more NAND writes than 150TB, that's why. I explained the calculation of TBW here:http://www.anandtech.com/show/7947/micron-m500-dc-...
However, as I mentioned in the article, in the client space the endurance is more for guidance (i.e. don't put these in servers!) than an actual technical limit.
emn13 - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
...but outside of server-like workloads, what's going to benefit from this performance?