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 | $183 | - |
The 850 EVO mSATA/M.2 is already available on Amazon and the pricing appears to be fairly competitive. It's not the cheapest mSATA/M.2 drive around, but the premium isn't that significant when taking 850 EVO's feature set into account (5-year warranty, hardware encryption etc.).
All in all, the 850 EVO presents another option to users who are looking for an mSATA or M.2 SSD. It's equipped with the same extensive feature set as its 2.5" sibling, the performance is good and the pricing is fair. As long as Samsung is able to fix the 1TB mSATA on a timely manner, I have no reason not to recommend the 850 EVO. After all, it's still the only mSATA with 1TB capacity.
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nmm - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Uninteresting releases like this are the reason M.2 is having so much trouble gaining traction. Desktop users have no reason to choose the M.2 variant since they'll get similar performance out of a much more versatile SATA variant. The only obvious reason I can see to buy mSATA/M.2 versions of this drive is if you've got a laptop that can't slot a regular 2½" SATA drive. What a waste of shelf space.bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
These are all way slow and almost outdated. INTEL and others coming out with NVMe and PCIe 3 stuff that are 2 to 4 times as fast. Big event from INTEL listed here.http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-...
Best to have an X99 mobo to make them bootable. Lots of these m.2 stuff is not bootable without lots of bios messing etc. Lots of info here
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-ssd-...
http://hothardware.com/reviews/Intel-SolidState-Dr...
blanarahul - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Those drives will cost upwards of 0.8$/GB. So you can't really compare those drives with these ones.Not to mention, they would be HHHL cards instead of M.2 and they use 20nm NAND which is almost 2 generations old.
bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Many of the m.2 sticks run very hot and manu are insertin g them into adapter cards to fit in pcie slot.Here is link to one....but its been removed from server and being sold before the consumer version is out. The cost is enormous because no other supply yet, but should be out to consumer in day or 2.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L0LFKQW/ref=wl_it_dp_o...
here is m.2 adapter card with heat sink for the samsung 941 ssd drive to put into pcie slot
http://www.amazon.com/Sintech-PCI-e-Adapter-Samsun...
but again, these early ones are difficult to make bootable, need x99 mobo and to get the nvme you need windows 8.1 which has native driver.
bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Here is link to intels countdown clock for their big announcement on m.2 ssdhttp://www.intelgamingpromo.com/intel15b/ssd/notic...
bricko - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
Mushkin Hyperion M.2 SSD Reaches 2.8GB/s and 350K IOPShttp://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz...
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
While I'm under NDA for that announcement, what I can tell you is that there's no M.2 coming tomorrow.bricko - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
Good explanation on how and what these new m.2 drives are and what you need to get them to work.http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2468965/ssd...
SunLord - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
I was so hoping to see a m.2 42mm option from Samsung...WackyDan - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Same here... So these aren't available in 42mm?