The Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA/M.2 Review
by Kristian Vättö on March 31, 2015 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
From a technological perspective, the new 850 EVO drives do not bring anything new to the table since it's essentially the 2.5" 850 EVO in a smaller form factor, but what it does bring to the market is more selection in mSATA and M.2 form factors using the SATA protocols. There still aren't too many mSATA/M.2 retail drives available, so the 850 EVO adds a lot of value to that segment because it's by far the fastest mSATA/M.2 SSD and in general the 850 EVO is one of the highest performing SATA drives on the market.
With that said, I do have some concerns regarding the 1TB model and its performance. Especially the IO consistency with 50-second pauses is worrying. While that won't have any major impact on very light workloads, anything that taxes the drive a bit more may run into the issue, which is basically that the drive stops for up to dozens of seconds (i.e. your system freezes). Until Samsung fixes that, I would advise against buying the 1TB version unless you have a very light workload (web browsing, email, etc.). I suspect it's fixable through a firmware update, but I'll have to wait for Samsung's reply to be sure of that.
| Amazon Price Comparison (3/29/2015) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 1TB | |
| Samsung 850 EVO mSATA | $80 | $130 | $230 | $450 |
| Samsung 850 EVO M.2 | $80 | $130 | $230 | - |
| Samsung 840 EVO mSATA | $89 | $150 | $228 | $429 |
| Crucial M550 mSATA | $172 | $107 | $184 | - |
| Crucial M500 M.2 | $88 | $129 | $244 | - |
| Crucial MX200 mSATA | - | $120 | $213 | - |
| Crucial MX200 M.2 | - | $120 | $226 | - |
| Plextor M6M mSATA | $76 | $133 | $280 | - |
| Mushkin Atlas Deluxe mSATA | $65 | $108 | $183 | - |
The 850 EVO mSATA/M.2 is already available on Amazon and the pricing appears to be fairly competitive. It's not the cheapest mSATA/M.2 drive around, but the premium isn't that significant when taking 850 EVO's feature set into account (5-year warranty, hardware encryption etc.).
All in all, the 850 EVO presents another option to users who are looking for an mSATA or M.2 SSD. It's equipped with the same extensive feature set as its 2.5" sibling, the performance is good and the pricing is fair. As long as Samsung is able to fix the 1TB mSATA on a timely manner, I have no reason not to recommend the 850 EVO. After all, it's still the only mSATA with 1TB capacity.
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Flunk - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
This is what makes M.2 such an annoying standard. They tried to accommodate everything and ended up with compromises that don't make sense and will probably be written out of the standard in a future version.setzer - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Also don't forget about the single and double sided thing as noted in the article there are some laptops that only accept single-sided.Also there is nothing to prevent a manafucturer to put a B+M keyed M.2 socket but only connect the USB traces. See toshiba's Z30's laptops for a pratical example.
The joys of M.2 are great :P
ilkhan - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
Answer: Ports should be wired and keyed for sata and pci-e.devices can be whatever they need.
The keys are there to prevent a pci-e device in a sata host.
rtho782 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
I still don't see a reason to replace my ageing 256GB Samsung 830s in RAID 0.I really want a decent PCIe NVMe M.2 or SATAe SSD of about 500GB, preferably Samsung and 3D nand. But nothing :(
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Looks like the 500GB model is the performance sweet spot.I'm not that surprised with the different performance profile on the 1TB model since it is using the older MEX controller. Could the 1TB's stuttering under steady state load be due to thermal throttling of the controller?
I was not expecting the smaller capacity drives, particularly the 120GB model to have such (relatively) low performance. Still, compared to drives of yesteryear, performance is still quite good. My HTPC has an old 96GB Kingston V+100 but still feels pretty snappy. I'm sure that even the 120GB 850 Evo would run circles around that drive - and as such have plenty of performance for an average user.
sonicmerlin - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Ha I have that exact same Kingston drive in my desktop. I can only install like 1 or 2 games at once, but it's totally worth it. I doubt any SSD upgrades would make my computer feel even faster than it already is.Mrduder11 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
I can't remeber where I read it but should we be concerned about these drives getting too hot where it affects performance?Mecharon1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Is this drive bootable? More specifically, can I install my OS on the 120GB M.2 version and use something else for bulk storage?foxtrot1_1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
That depends on the motherboard, but Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 should allow you to boot from M.2 no problem. Your BIOS is the issue.This is a golden age for PC hardware (at least, it will be this fall) but the proliferation of specifications and standards is really stupid. Get your act together, OEMs.
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
SATA is always bootable regardless of the form factor and OS, and the 850 EVO is a SATA drive (M.2 supports both SATA and PCIe). The bootability issue only applies to PCIe M.2 drives.