Hardware Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB Review

Before long those funny little spinning platters will be a thing of the past, except perhaps for those users who need huge capacity. But how long before SSDs are available in multi-terabyte capacities? I don't see it being more than a year or two.

 

They're getting there. 128GB Indilinx drives were £300 to £350 shortly after launch, a little over five years ago; and now you can get a terrabyte for roughly the same money.

I picked up two factory reconditioned 256GB M4s for less than £80 last week - No more spinning disks in my rig, although still have them in my backup array.

 

Would gaming use come under the power user category? would an mx100 suffice where it is mainly read rather than write tasks or would the 850 evo provide better performance for loading game data?

 

We are years away from SSDs replacing HDDs. It's not just the availability of larger capacity SSDs but the price difference between the two formats. 1TB drives in both 3.5 and 2.5 (laptop) can be had for around the £40-£45 mark, compare that with £300+ for an SSD. So while having an SSD as a system drive is a benefit to almost all users, it just isn't viable for the vast majority of users to look at SSDs as their main storage.

Back to the topic... Performance has largely hit a ceiling point when it comes to speed as these drives have almost identical speeds of the 840 EVOs, I know there is M.2 but what is likely to be the next industry standard for increased bandwidth? Is it SATA IV or is some other standard on it's way? It's been a while since I looked in to it.

 

In order for mechanical drives to go away we need a new branch in SSD technology.
150-200MB read/write speeds at £60/TB. I would not want to pay for 6TB in flash storage with today's prices. These would sell well enough as they would be silent, sip power, run cool, take less physical spance and less prone to failure than current mechanical drives.

In face I won't replace my Samsung 830 256GB until I can get a 1TB drive for £150 and as long as it isn't slower, performance be damned.

 

I agree with you silk186, current SSD speeds are fast enough for me to be happy. I was just wondering where the next bump would come from.

 

I thought I read an article around here about 3D NAND and how SSDs are about to get a capacity / performance boost at "market impacting" costs -- ie, they'll be 5-10 times larger for the same cost as current drives.

 

Not until a long time after R 'N' D costs have been covered they won't.

 

I've been spinning disk free for two years now, also using 2 M4s, in RAID 0. No going back for me.

 

I installed a 1TB 850 Pro in my X230 at the start of October, to replace a full 512GB 840 Pro. All the speed, all the storage, all the time! They are excellent, and well worth the money. I saw a big boost in speed between my new USB 3.0 external hard drive (which is a WD Scorpio black in disguise) and the SSD, as well as better overall system performance.

As an interesting comparison, the first SSD I ever ran personally was a 120GB OCZ Vertex II, which I bought in early 2010 at a price of ~£350. This 1TB 850 EVO is not much more than that, and obviously outperforms the OCZ in speed, value and reliability by a huge margin.

 

Ah, the mighty single-digit investment in a screwdriver, or the unachievalble richnesses of a ten quid 32-piece-apple-repair-kit.

Yes, very difficult.

Mine are in a multi-bit-set from Aldi, surely a pinnacle of high-tech-attachment-devices.
Also came with the elusive triple-wing-Siemens-bits that enable you to see their 100 pound Porsche-Design coffee maker has plastik innards that break within a year...woohoo

 

Now all we need is for Intel and AMD to provide more of those on mid level CPUs.

 

Mine's an ifixit set. There is hardly a fastener in the world I couldn't undo with my various security bit sets (cue a photo of a 6' industrial hammerhead T- bolt ).

 

Would an 850 evo be better for gaming than something cheaper like the mx100 or even my current drive (250 gb 840)? The value for money on these drives is amazing now.

 

NVME is already on the market and the benefits are indeed massive, however it is still unclear as to when it will finally filter down to consumer products as currently it is exclusive to enterprise products in the five digit and above price range.

 

I wonder why you persist with the AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks.

They consistently give high marks with little differentiation to drives that do relatively poorly in real-world situations; take the performance of the 1T drive here in Bootracer, for example.

The cleverness in modern SSDs goes beyond simple 4k random vs sequential, reads vs writes. The SSD needs to balance competing requirements to do both reads and writes, caching enough of writes to do something bursty, while not throwing too much out of read cache. Measuring each facet in isolation doesn't do much to measure the intelligence at work. You see the enormous disparity in the database workloads where the simplistic benchmarks show little deviation.