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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cleverdude - Saturday, April 18, 2015 - link
Bench results have not been updated.http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
szhosain - Monday, May 4, 2015 - link
On my Lenovo W530 laptop (about 3 years old now), I just installed a Samsung 850 EVO MSATA 1TB card, and ATTO shows me poorer numbers than seen here. About 267 MB/sec for write and 280 MB/sec for read when it peaks. My 2.5" SSD drives (from OCZ) in the same system are well over 500 MB /sec.Does this perhaps mean that the MSATA interface on this laptop is limited to 3 GB/sec rather than the 6 GB /sec on the standard SATA interfaces?
That would be quite irritating!
Ethos Evoss - Sunday, June 21, 2015 - link
When it comes to mSATA or M.2 connected to SATA III there is no point purchase stupid expensive SSDs as they will perform same as cheapest ones ..So best mSATA/m.2 SSD for SATA III use is the plextor or mushkin (i preffer plextor) which cost less and has great performance
Andrew Field - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
This Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA constantly overheats. This is especially the case when copying large files. It rises about 10C every 30-60 seconds, and does not stop until its own overheating protection kicks in. This occurs when it is in a laptop or in an external enclosure (even when open and exposed to the air).Initially I thought I had a bad piece of hardware, but I tested 5 separate units with consistent results.
If anyone decides to test this out, I did the following:
- Step 1: Select a folder with at least 100GB of data
- Step 2: Copy said folder to a new folder (on the same Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA)
- Step 3: Monitored the temperature
Result: The temperature begins rising sharply in a few seconds, and does not stop rising until the SSD engages its overheating protection.
greywarden - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link
I was about to purchase (4) 250GB 850 EVO mSATA drives to put in an Addonics quad mSATA PCIe card, but seeing the latency numbers on the drive has me concerned. Should I look into purchasing a pair of the 500GB models instead? Have the pausing and crashing problems been solved with the 1TB model yet?payamfi - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Hi guys i wanna buy a memmory for my n551jx i can not decide what to buy msata evo mini or ssd evo pro can anyone help me out?fabbrimichele75 - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
Would it be possible to know the temperature when the disk is in idle and full load?I'm mainly interested in the M.2 version.
I'm asking because I wanted to mount it on an NUC 6i5 that seems to be sensitive to high temperature.
yolomolo - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Can i get some advice from you PRO, should i better go get mSata : Samsung EVO 850 or CRUCIAL MX200 ?