Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: The Last Hoorah For SATA

Steve

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[newwindow=https://www.techspot.com/review/838-samsung-850-pro-ssd/]https://www.techspot.com/review/838-samsung-850-pro-ssd/[/newwindow]

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Article picture on main techspot page show nokia x (or x2) phone.

on topic:
... can also handle a total of 150TB worth of writes before expiring
wow.
Samsung offers an incredible 10-year warranty with the 850 Pro SSD series
wow x2.

hope the retail price of samsung ssd 850 pro series will become closer to hdd... or not. :(
With the SSD 850 Pro's performance as good as a SATA SSD is going to be right now, a $10 to $30 boost in price over the 840 Pro series isn't surprising. As it stands, 128GB costs $130 or $1.00/GB, 256GB is $230 ($0.89/GB), the 512GB model we tested costs $430 ($0.83/GB) and the 1TB 850 Pro is listed at $730 ($0.73/GB).
 
Very impressive on Samsung's part to squeeze every last drop of performance out of SATA 6 GB/s. Thanks @Steve for constantly putting together these great benchmarks. I find TS hardware reviews a lot better than other sites just because the charts are a lot cleaner and easier to read. I, and many others I bet, appreciate that. Thanks.

I really cannot wait to Samsung bring the 850 series architecture to other interfaces like PCIe or mSATA. That will really allow the new NAND to shine.

Side note: very intriguing RAPID mode results in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. They are quite dramatic.
 
Nice review, Only thing I wish you guys could include is the Corsair Neutron GTX SSD's as they use some crazy 8 core propriety controller on them, would be interesting to know where they sit amongst the others!

Other than that, Samsung have definitely proved that their new NAND works like a charm.
 
Nice review, Only thing I wish you guys could include is the Corsair Neutron GTX SSD's as they use some crazy 8 core propriety controller on them, would be interesting to know where they sit amongst the others!

Other than that, Samsung have definitely proved that their new NAND works like a charm.

Thank you. I was under the impression that the Neutron GTX series was quite old, there is also nothing crazy about its controller. I was also under the impression that is was slower than the 840 Pro, wasn't it released around the same time as the 830 Pro? I must admit I am not as up to date as I should be with the Corsair SSDs, has their been a new revision?
 
Thank you. I was under the impression that the Neutron GTX series was quite old, there is also nothing crazy about its controller. I was also under the impression that is was slower than the 840 Pro, wasn't it released around the same time as the 830 Pro? I must admit I am not as up to date as I should be with the Corsair SSDs, has their been a new revision?
Well I've been following the story you guys linked to on the weekends, the one about killing SSD's with writes to see how long they last? Last article Techspot linked to was when they hit the Petabyte threshold, Samsung had a drive die but the Corsair not only was the strongest performer from the start (even against the 840 Pro) but hasn't slowed down almost at all since the start, while all the other SSD's are getting slower and slower by the 100TB.

I just thought to give the charts some variety, the Corsair Neutron GTX would be worth including as it includes a different controller compared to a lot of offerings which are just customized Sandforce controllers.
 
The last gasp of the dying species, SATA-III, only survived by RAID-0. A-man!

Reminds me of Verbatim's efforts at releasing faster floppy drives back then, but they didn't even support the RAID :)
 
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Yeah the drive scores well on the benchmarks and is very fast but looking at the numbers the Crucial MX100 is not very far behind in many tests. Can't beat the so called bang for the buck that the MX100 delivers. I got a 512GB MX100 for $199.
 
Please SATA3 just die already! I wonder what speed this hardware would do without the SATA bottleneck?

10 year warranty is incredible! Kudos Samsung for setting the bar.
 
Yeah the drive scores well on the benchmarks and is very fast but looking at the numbers the Crucial MX100 is not very far behind in many tests. Can't beat the so called bang for the buck that the MX100 delivers. I got a 512GB MX100 for $199.

And for the same price you can find 2 x MX100 and in RAID-0 they will far outperform the new 850 Pro ;)
 
I have recently been looking into getting an SSD and looking at a stress test on "The Tech Report" site, they put their drives through a series of writes. The Samsung Evo Pro, and Corsair Neuron GTX seemed to be doing well to get past 1 Petabyte, and they still live.

I would expect this new 850 to do better. The only problem with Stress Testing SSDs as far as I can see is that firstly, power outages can = loss of data. Sure we all lose data if theres a power cut and we havent saved our work. But from what I was reading this can really screw the pooch on SSD's more so than on HDD's.

Secondly each SSD make has its own software, that determines when things are failing. The Corsair SSD software, shows that with its current speed of decline the drive would surpass 4 Petabytes of writes before giving up. Which even they were like "we should ask corsair how they measure the rate this drive is dying at".

Would like to see this drive do the Petabyte test. If any drive can survive that I would be more than happy to run it as an OS drive that I can format at will.
 
THE most impressive thing for me here, is the 10 year warranty given by Samsung.

According to some life span tests done (Over 1000tb data written) I've checked out some SSDs should work for a common user for about 75 years on average. And those came with a 3 year warranty.
 
The 840 Pro series are great, but looking at this review, if I was going to buy a SSD today the 850 would now be my pick!
 
What I want to know is what's the next form factor after SATAIII? Is it PCIe or mSATA? Wouldn't PCIe use a graphics card slot? In that case, wouldn't mSATA be the way to go?
I'm wondering because when I decide to upgrade my system, I want to make sure it fully supports the next interface iteration.
 
What I want to know is what's the next form factor after SATAIII? Is it PCIe or mSATA? Wouldn't PCIe use a graphics card slot? In that case, wouldn't mSATA be the way to go?
I'm wondering because when I decide to upgrade my system, I want to make sure it fully supports the next interface iteration.

PCIe x16 is the slot used for video cards, there are also x4 and x1 slots, the latter normally used for expansion cards like wifi, video capture and whatnot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-Express
 
What I want to know is what's the next form factor after SATAIII? Is it PCIe or mSATA? Wouldn't PCIe use a graphics card slot? In that case, wouldn't mSATA be the way to go?
I'm wondering because when I decide to upgrade my system, I want to make sure it fully supports the next interface iteration.

mSATA is SATA, its the exact same bus interface. The future options include M.2 which is a bit like what mSATA is for SATA but using the PCIe interface with SATA protocols or SATA Express.

I have recently been looking into getting an SSD and looking at a stress test on "The Tech Report" site, they put their drives through a series of writes. The Samsung Evo Pro, and Corsair Neuron GTX seemed to be doing well to get past 1 Petabyte, and they still live.

I would expect this new 850 to do better. The only problem with Stress Testing SSDs as far as I can see is that firstly, power outages can = loss of data. Sure we all lose data if theres a power cut and we havent saved our work. But from what I was reading this can really screw the pooch on SSD's more so than on HDD's.

Secondly each SSD make has its own software, that determines when things are failing. The Corsair SSD software, shows that with its current speed of decline the drive would surpass 4 Petabytes of writes before giving up. Which even they were like "we should ask corsair how they measure the rate this drive is dying at".

Would like to see this drive do the Petabyte test. If any drive can survive that I would be more than happy to run it as an OS drive that I can format at will.

For the petabyte test to be accurate you really need to test a minimum of 6 retail drives, if not a dozen. It’s an interesting test no doubt but I wouldn’t place much stock in it.

As for power outages I have not experienced any issues. I live in a rural area that suffers regular outages and my system runs 24/7 using the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB. The system faces dozens of power outages per year and I have never had a problem. The system always just boots back up like nothing happened and software such as word/excel and chrome all restore my work to where I was last.

Please SATA3 just die already! I wonder what speed this hardware would do without the SATA bottleneck?

10 year warranty is incredible! Kudos Samsung for setting the bar.

Our file copy tests would go unchanged. The drive is the bottleneck here. Stick this controller and memory on an M.2 card and you will find the sequential read/writes are higher but things like on-disk copy's will remain the same. Most data transfers are conduced on disk with SSD's (especially boot drives) so we feel this is the most valid way to measure performance.
 
As for power outages I have not experienced any issues. I live in a rural area that suffers regular outages and my system runs 24/7 using the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB. The system faces dozens of power outages per year and I have never had a problem. The system always just boots back up like nothing happened and software such as word/excel and chrome all restore my work to where I was last.
You can buy an APC (or other) UPS for pretty cheap nowadays and then can be more confident about running more performant cache settings.

It'll also be kinder on your PSU as the UPS will filter the line voltages as they are only going to get worse with more distributed generation feeding rubbish (noise) into the grid.
 
:'( I bought 840 Pro 256GB this morning. I should of just wait until weekend... :mad:
 
Anandtech wrote in their review that Samsung has a 850 Pro in-house that has passed 8PB of writing.
So that 150TB rating is probably extremely relaxed, Samsung even said that when it crosses that mark it wont mean the warranty is out. (Unlike all other brands).
3D NAND really is a game changer, the lithography is comparable to 40nm, that's just 10nm shy of the 5 year old Intel X25 SSD's drives lithography.
Yet those cost around $8 per gigabyte when they where released.
And now Samsung is able to offer us even longer endurance yet at a price of not even 1/10th per gigabyte.
It's really a great time to be looking to buy an SSD :)

Oh and Steve, do buy a UPS :)
 
This ssd is a beast and the testing is ok. my only concern is in the 'real world' tests. those show very little read and write benefits. I think the tests are not done right as caching implies repetability, meaning you have to do the same more than once. for example I would think about loading visual studio with a large solution and doing a build or scanning the same files repeatedly, loading a game close load again etc. visual studio would be a realy good example as it tends to do a lot of small reads and writes. of course it depends on how much the work is limited by io. please correct if I'm wrong.
 
Nobody saying whether this equiv to 1bit 2bit or 3bit nand? Nice but until they put on a dimm stick and replace ram I'm still waiting ....2 x mx100 in raid0 might stomp this?
 
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