Samsung adds 860 PRO and 860 EVO to growing family of consumer-grade SSDs

[Shawn Knight]

Samsung on Tuesday added two new members to its growing family of consumer-grade SSDs, the 860 PRO and the 860 EVO.

The 860 PRO, the higher-end of the two new models, offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 560MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively, with random read and write speeds of up to 100K IOPS and 90K IOPS. It’ll be offered in capacities of 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB in a 2.5-inch form factor and comes backed by a five-year warranty, or up to 4,800 terabytes written.

The 860 EVO, meanwhile, boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 550 MB/s and 520 MB/s with max random read and write speeds of 98K IOPS and 90K IOPS. You’ll be able to pick up an 860 EVO in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities in your choice of 2.5-inch, mSATA (up to 2TB) or M.2 (1TB) form factors.

Like the 860 PRO, the new 860 EVO is also backed by a five-year warranty although it’s only good for up to 2,400 terabytes written. Both utilize Samsung’s MJX controller and V-NAND memory and are compatible with Samsung’s Magician software for management purposes.

Pricing starts at $94.99 for the 860 EVO and $139.99 for the 860 PRO with both drives slated to launch sometime this month.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/72894-samsung-adds-860-pro-860-evo-growing-family.html

 

[VitalyT]

They exhausted SATA-III bandwidth with their 840 Pro. 850 Pro and now 860 Pro are just a marketing puff to revive sales of the dormant product.

 

[jonny888]

They exhausted SATA-III bandwidth with their 840 Pro. 850 Pro and now 860 Pro are just a marketing puff to revive sales of the dormant product.

To be fair, I don't recall the 840 Pro/Evo ever having a 4TB option available, and the fact that SATA-III is bandwidth saturated is really not an issue for most use cases (as higher speeds have diminishing returns on perceived improvement outside of incredibly disk heavy workloads). What really matters is the price/GB ratio. Hopefully their new range will drive down the price of their existing ranges, which could be really good for people looking to have large drives for their Steam library (or other game libraries of choice).

Then again, it might not really drive prices down that much, in which case it is indeed slightly underwhelming.

 

[pencea]

I long for the day where 4TB SSD are as affordable as current hard drive prices.

 

[cliffordcooley]

If the 4TB ever drops to $150, I'll never buy a spinner again.

 

[trparky]

Only 2400 TBs

You're talking like that's a bad thing.

Considering that I've had an 850 EVO for over three years and I've only recently reached 20 TB written and 39 out of the possible 2000 total erasure counts I'm doing pretty good. And no I'm not treating my SSD with kid gloves, I use this SSD like I would any other hard drive and I write as much stuff to it as I can. I even decompress and compress data on the SSD because it's so much faster than on my hard drives. So with the fact that this SSD says that it's only good for up to 2400 TBs this SSD will long outlive most people's systems by a huge amount.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Considering that I've had an 850 EVO for over three years and I've only recently reached 20 TB written and 39 out of the possible 2000 total erasure counts I'm doing pretty good.

Are you using a utility from Samsung to call up that data? I'd like to check mine.

 

[trparky]

Considering that I've had an 850 EVO for over three years and I've only recently reached 20 TB written and 39 out of the possible 2000 total erasure counts I'm doing pretty good.

Are you using a utility from Samsung to call up that data? I'd like to check mine.

Yes, I am using the Samsung SSD Magician.

 

[cliffordcooley]

I just checked and mine is 8TB Written on a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO.

 

[trparky]

I just checked and mine is 8TB Written on a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO.

And how old is it? To find out open up the Samsung SSD Magician, make sure you choose the SSD, click on the S.M.A.R.T. button and look at the Raw Data value for the Power-On Hours. Simply take that number and convert it to years using your favorite data converter (or do the math yourself) and that will give you the age of your SSD.

Myself, I simply asked Siri on my phone to convert 23,646 hours to years and she said 2.7 years.

Ok, so I lied about how old my SSD is but it's damn close to being three years old.

 

[cliffordcooley]

And how old is it?

Don't recall exactly. I'd say three years tops. I have an Excel file of all my components. There is no date of purchase but I do have the 850 EVO listed and the file was last updated Jan of 2016.

Edit:
I called up the power on hours and have a value of 24,138. That equates to 2 years and 9 months not counting power off time. I've probably got 2 months power off time, but that is irrelevant for usage data. Life span though is another matter as it proves I hardly ever power off my machine and 3 years later the drive is still going strong.

 

[Darth Shiv]

They exhausted SATA-III bandwidth with their 840 Pro. 850 Pro and now 860 Pro are just a marketing puff to revive sales of the dormant product.

Not necessarily. Remember that is sustained transfers they have saturated. They haven't gotten anywhere close on random 4k read/writes and tbh those are extremely impactful on many system configs.

 

[Darth Shiv]

I just checked and mine is 8TB Written on a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO.

And how old is it? To find out open up the Samsung SSD Magician, make sure you choose the SSD, click on the S.M.A.R.T. button and look at the Raw Data value for the Power-On Hours. Simply take that number and convert it to years using your favorite data converter (or do the math yourself) and that will give you the age of your SSD.

Myself, I simply asked Siri on my phone to convert 23,646 hours to years and she said 2.7 years.

Ok, so I lied about how old my SSD is but it's damn close to being three years old.

Well that only applies if you have it on 24x7

12,000 hours and 9.3TB on my 1TB 850 EVO.

 

[trparky]

OK, then that tells you how long the SSD has been operating. If you have only written 8 TBs in close to three years then that 850 EVO is going to long outlast your system. And 850 EVO has been shown to be able to handle nearly 200 TBs.

 

[mbrowne5061]

Only 2400 TBs

You're talking like that's a bad thing.

Considering that I've had an 850 EVO for over three years and I've only recently reached 20 TB written and 39 out of the possible 2000 total erasure counts I'm doing pretty good. And no I'm not treating my SSD with kid gloves, I use this SSD like I would any other hard drive and I write as much stuff to it as I can. I even decompress and compress data on the SSD because it's so much faster than on my hard drives. So with the fact that this SSD says that it's only good for up to 2400 TBs this SSD will long outlive most people's systems by a huge amount.

Exactly. You would have to be using it as a scratch drive for an Adobe product in order to begin to put a dent in that limit.

 

[trparky]

Yeah so all of this talk lately about how SSDs have to be treated differently and that you have to worry about the longevity of the drive is total bull. So go ahead, use that SSD! Write all you want to it because unless you're really seriously abusing the heck out of it that SSD will far outlast your current system and more than likely will be able to go into your next system with no issues and plenty of gas left in the tank.

 

[Darth Shiv]

Yeah so all of this talk lately about how SSDs have to be treated differently and that you have to worry about the longevity of the drive is total bull. So go ahead, use that SSD! Write all you want to it because unless you're really seriously abusing the heck out of it that SSD will far outlast your current system and more than likely will be able to go into your next system with no issues and plenty of gas left in the tank.

Yeah I've had to debunk that one a few times.

I wish enterprise SSDs were a bit cheaper though! Want to roll them out to new VM servers but the cost on the options from Dell is just ridiculous.

 

[pcnthuziast]

Sadly I don't expect to see SSD prices drop even a tiny bit this year and fully expect to see the 850's and 860's selling for about the same price +/- 10 or 15 dollars.