Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 8, 2014 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The 850 EVO is yet another showcase of Samsung's engineering talent and truth to be told there is a lot of good in the 850 EVO. By combining TLC with V-NAND technology, Samsung is eliminating any and all concerns that people might have had about the endurance of TLC NAND and to back that up Samsung is rating the 850 EVO's endurance higher than the MLC drives of most manufacturers. I never considered the endurance of TLC NAND to be an issue for average client workloads, but I saw many people who were doubtful about the sufficiency of 1,000 P/E cycles, so with twice that in TLC V-NAND I believe many will and should stop treating TLC as a second class citizen.
Not only is the endurance higher, but the 850 EVO's performance is also better compared to its predecessor. In our 2011 Storage Benches the 850 EVO matches up with the 850 Pro and is hence one of the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSDs for typical client workloads. In very heavy workloads, illustrated by our 2013 Storage Bench, the 850 EVO does okay, but it's clear that it's outperformed by drives that are more optimized for such usage.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (12/7/2014) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO (MSRP) | $100 | $150 | $270 | $500 |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro | $105 | $180 | $320 | $630 |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $85 | $125 | $230 | $440 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | - | $150 | $328 | $531 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $80 | $110 | $220 | $420 |
| Crucial MX100 | $70 | $113 | $215 | - |
| Crucial M550 | $85 | $163 | $265 | $450 |
| Plextor M6S | $80 | $158 | $290 | - |
| Intel SSD 730 | - | $130 | $220 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $75 | $130 | $240 | - |
| OCZ ARC 100 | $70 | $100 | $215 | - |
There is one huge 'but' however – the price. The 850 EVO is a very competitive drive in performance and features, but neither of these warrants the premium Samsung is charging. As I've said before, there are only two main segments in the SSD market that I recognize, which are the value/mainstream and high-end/enthusiast segments.
For the value segment, the key consideration is the price because these are typically users who don't push their systems to the limits and thus shouldn't pay a premium for a performance increase that is likely to be negligible for their usage. Our Light Workload suite highlights this pretty well because the difference between most drives is on the order of 10-20% and while a possible 10% increase in performance would be worth $5, $10 and maybe even $20 to some users, it's definitely not worth the ~$50 Samsung is charging for the 850 EVO over Crucial's MX100 and SanDisk's Ultra II for example.
As for the high-end segment, Samsung already has that one covered by the 850 Pro. The 850 EVO, especially at the smaller capacities, isn't fast enough under IO intensive workloads to really compete with the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro. Given that the Extreme Pro can be had for about the same cost (depending on the capacity, of course), I would much rather have that if I was looking for a high-end SSD.
In other words, the 850 EVO falls into the infamous middle-class. It doesn't have an obvious niche in the market because it's too expensive for the value-oriented buyer and it's not fast enough to be considered as a competitive high-end SSD. If Samsung shaved $30 to $50 off the price, the 850 EVO would be competitive against the other value drives because the five-year warranty and Samsung's top-of-the-class software suite add some value, but with the current pricing there are just better options on the market.
A part of me sees that it might have been worthwhile for Samsung to do one more planar NAND shrink to be more competitive in the mainstream segment because right now the 850 EVO is missing that market. While 3D NAND will eventually become more cost efficient as the number of layers increases, we are not there yet. I absolutely love all the performance and endurance benefits V-NAND is bringing to the table, but if the 850 EVO can't even compete with MLC drives in price, that's a bit alarming.
There is still hope that the MSRPs are just conservative and street prices could end up lower. If they don't, while the 850 EVO is clearly the best performing "value" drive, it likely won't see the same sort of success as its predecessor. Samsung also has a strong presence in the OEM desktop and laptop markets, but OEMs may not see enough to sway them over from the 840 EVO if prices are quite a bit higher.
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Kevin G - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
What version is the firmware of the 840 EVO? There is a notorious bug out there that'll drastically reduce the speed of the drive when it attempts to read data.See:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-release...
romrunning - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
That's the bug about reading really old data. If he did an upgrade, then it wouldn't be really old data on the new drive.It also doesn't apply to the point he was making - would I subjectively "feel" the difference if I upgrade to the 850 EVO from an older <insert_brand_here> SSD?
doggghouse - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
On one of these review sites, they mentioned that the step up from HDD to SSD is enormous, but between the different generations of SSD the difference isn't nearly as noticeable. Depending on the test, the difference between HDD and SSD is anywhere from 2.5x faster (ex. sequential write) to 140x faster (ex. random write). You definitely will not see such a marked improvement going from one SSD to another.Also I agree with your point about the benchmarks being pointless for the average user. A lot of the benchmarks are geared towards enterprise usage. I think part of the problem is that the drives all behave pretty similarly (compared to HDD anyway), until they are pushed to the extremes. That's the only way for the reviews to differentiate between them, unless they find a particular weak point or flaw.
eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
The performance profile of the drives and your workload will dictate if you notice the better performance. I would guess that you got a lot more GBs/$ when you picked up the Evo versus the Corsair drive. Also, not you don't need to struggle to get everything on to your boot drive. At the same time your computer may only startup 2 or 3 seconds faster.They don't for an average user, but if you're here there's a good chance you're not an average user. And those fancy benchmark numbers cost you what?
There are real life workloads that will benefit for an average user. I have seen the consistency play out in my usage in various drives. I have seen garbage collection routines cause some painful performance issues in software encrypted drives.
MrSpadge - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
With a half-decent SSD your I/O is probalby mostly CPU-limited in the real world anyway.ummduh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
In my opinion, the best reason to continue to upgrade, is capacity increases.My first drive was 60GB, my second is 120GB, looks like my third is going to be 250GB....
No the speed difference isn't that drastic once you get off the HDD, but now you can start keeping more and more stuff on a drive at the same price point. All of my drives have been at the $150 point.. (Ok, so I had 3 different 60GB drives, but that was due to not realizing how bad OCZ suuuuuucked and I kept going back like a moron)
cm2187 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
The other thing is that most SSDs now are limited by the SATA interface. And to be honest, unless you are running a database with thousands of queries per seconds, beating the SATA interface won't really add much to your experience. Larger capacities I think would be more useful.Badelhas - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Thats exactly what I always think when I read this reviews. Altough they are great to read, for someone who already has a SSD the gains are not noticeable. I have a Vertex 3 120Gb that I bought in 2011 and been questioning myself if I would se any real gains going to a 840 Evo, for instance, since they are much newer but you just answered my question ;)matej_eu - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I am in a similar situation. My first SSD was the ADATA's SP600@64GB running on SataII, I was so mesmerized by the speed of everything (boot time, installation, app run in time, ...). I really do take care of my Win installation, drivers, and apps, but in the end size was to small for boot+main drive in laptop. I bought Samsung 840 EVO@120GB, and in the recent times I thought I was going crazy, system was noticeably slowing down. I googled, and what do you now, problems, no more Samsung EVOs for me!! Buy Samsung 8x0 PRO or some other brand.milli - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Your Intel SSD 730 prices are wrong. They might have gone up.The price of the ARC 100 is amazing ATM. It scores very good in the '2013 Storage Bench service time' which in my experience tells the most about how SSDs feel in actual usage.