Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 8, 2014 10:00 AM ESTPower Consumption
Samsung has always done a great job at power efficiency and the 850 EVO is no exception. In slumber mode the 850 EVO is one of the most efficient drives we have seen and it also explains why Samsung went with the new MGX controller as the 500GB and smaller capacities consume about 30% less power than the 1TB model.
Load power consumption is also exceptional, although once again I should note that the writes are hitting the SLC buffer, which is more power efficient than writing to the TLC array. Right after I stopped writing to the drive I saw the power consumption increase to ~3W while the drive was reading data from SLC and writing it to TLC, but that didn't take longer than 10-20 seconds or so (though it depends on how much you write to the drive). I have some tests prepared for our 2015 SSD suite that will look at power over time more closely, so it will also better account for SLC to MLC/TLC writes.
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eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Turbowrite is a default feature. It is marketing speak for optimizations to increase write performance in write workloads. It can't be turned on or off.erple2 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Well, it has to be able to be turned on/off, as Kristian has a chart showing the difference in write speeds with it on/off. However, unlike "RAPID", there is no downside to leaving it on.geniekid - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Well written conclusion.andrewbaggins - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's hard to understand why your SSD reviews fail to include Idle Power Consumption charts. For the hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power it would be far more useful if you included a chart for typical or average power consumed during Idle state.metayoshi - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
"Hundreds of millions of PCs and laptops in use which do not support the so-called Slumber Power."Woah... I don't know where you got that "hundreds of millions" number from, but any system that supports SATA is able to support Slumber. Slumber has been in the SATA spec since forever, and pretty much all 2.5" drives, and some 3.5" drives support this power state.
metayoshi - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
P.S. As an example, I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 sitting in my cubicle at work on an Asus PSE WS Pro motherboard. I have no Idea how old this thing is, but it's running a SATA-II 3.0 Gbps interface, and that great grandfather of a system supports HIPM+DIPM, and does Partial and Slumber on a variety of SSDs and HDDs.eanazag - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Newegg has a promotion for these drives ending 12/14/14 (US $) -120GB @ $89.99
250GB @ $139.99
500GB @ $249.99
1TB @ $469.99
eddieobscurant - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I think an 120gb 850 evo usb thumb drive would be awesome .dwade123 - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Realworld: all modern ssds have similar windows boot and game loading time. All these synthetic tests are just for reviewers to have something talk about, and marketing purposes. Meh.StrangerGuy - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I would rather want a SSD that has 90% of a MX100 but only 50% dollar per GB, instead of extra performance that 99% of SSD buyers will not never benefit for more money.