The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend
by Billy Tallis on January 23, 2018 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
Samsung's dominance of this test wasn't being seriously challenged, but the 512GB 860 PRO does show improvement to the average data rate on The Destroyer, putting it up in the range of Samsung's multi-TB SATA drives. It's a small change, but SATA doesn't leave room for big gains.
The good average and 99th percentile latency scores of the SanDisk Ultra 3D match or beat the best scores from the Samsung SATA drives. The 512GB 860 PRO shows substantial improvement in 99th percentile latency and more modest gains in average latency, relative to the 850 PRO.
The Samsung 860 PROs show the best average read latencies in their respective product classes, but the SanDisk Ultra 3D isn't far behind. For average write latencies, the Ultra 3D takes a clear lead over the Samsung drives, and the Crucial BX300 is ahead of the Samsung drives by a hair.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 860 PRO show substantial improvements at 512GB, and smaller improvements among the multi-TB drives.
While the 4TB 860 PRO performed better on The Destroyer than the 512GB model by every measure, the 512GB model was more power efficient, and sets a new record for its class. The improvements relative to the 850 PRO are remarkable: the old 512GB 850 PRO required 60% more energy to complete The Destroyer than the new 512GB 860 PRO. Samsung has caught up with the modern competitors in terms of energy efficiency.
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WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Impressive drive. We've definitely hit the point where the SATA bottleneck prevents any serious performance improvements. Looks like the 860 EVO nearly matches the PRO's speeds (at least on paper) and costs 33% less at all capacities. It seems like the trend will continue of recommending the latest Samsung EVO drive to anyone who needs a SATA SSD and people with extra money to spend can upgrade to the PRO. Almost no reason to buy any other drives unless you can find them at ridiculous sale prices.generaldwarf - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
the 860 evo is 33% cheaper and 50% less endurant = 860 pro is cheaper on the long runDanNeely - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Unless you're doing insanely high write levels (for anything in the consumer/prosumer space) both drives will probably fail in 5-10 years of old age without coming anywhere near their endurance limits. The pro just has extra overkill on that number.Flunk - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Definitely, for client loads you're not going to hit that write endurance before the drive dies from something else.But if the Samsung 860 PRO dies within 10 years it's still under warranty. I recently had a 4.5 year old Samsung 840 PRO die on me and Samsung shipped me an essentially brand new 850 PRO as a replacement. The EVO comes with a 5 year warranty, which while good, is not as good.
DanNeely - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
The 860pro is down to the same 5 years as the 860 EVO.chrcoluk - Friday, September 6, 2019 - link
My 850 pro almost died at 4 years and 10 months (mirroring your view that a 5 year warranty is pushing it close).Sent to samsung RMA, they ran what was clearly a very basic test only (they completed RMA testing in just 40 mins according to status page) and returned as non faulty.
They returned a drive that was randomly not appearing at post and had corrupted boot files as non faulty. I didnt trust it so put it in a spare rig, installed windows on it, and ran some i/o tests, on the first test it locked up during heavy i/o load. After giving it a while to recover I rebooted and the drive was gone in bios, but this time it hasnt recovered at all now seemingly completely dead.
For the curious the erase cycles are extremely low only 40 or so erase cycles, data written was at over 20TB, nowhere near the 150TB warranty.
Given these figures I would say a higher amount of years on the warranty is far more valuable than a higher TBW limit, so the 860 pro's are a nerf. The fact samsung are no longer willing to offer 10 years on their pro units is quite telling. If the 10 year policy wasnt costing them money then they wouldnt mind doing it, which must mean the failure rate at 4+ years is high enough to warrant the change.
Alistair - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
MX500 is cheaper, performs almost the same. And they actually provide warranty service in Canada properly, unlike Samsung.Check this forum:
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/has-anyone-dealt-s...
Samus - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Yeah, hard to ignore the MX500 and BX300 (if looking for a smaller capacity drive) because they are so easy to find, inexpensive, and the support is solid. I’ve had great luck with crucial/Micron drives, especially models with Marvell controllers, for nearly a decade. I’ll never forget when I installed the C300 in my laptop in 2010, my first experience with 500MB/sec data transfers and 5 second windows startups.Samus - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The long run of what? By the time the drive warranty is up SATA will go the way of PATA/IDE. Does anybody seriously think SATA will be around in 5 years? We already have consumer hard drives bottlenecked by SATA2!smilingcrow - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
I fully expect SATA3 to be still around in 5 years. Hard Drives and even DVDs aren't going away and it would seem pointless to replace SATA for those types of devices as it offers sufficient bandwidth for years to come.