Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts

Conclusion:

PROS:

  • Outstanding performance
  • Excellent fragmentation resiliency
  • 10 Year Warranty (yeah, I said it)

CONS:

  • Hard to come up with one, but I'd really like to see this V-NAND doing the TLC/SLC trick that the EVO series does. Samsung tells me this is absolutely doable, which likely makes this con into a pro.
  • Intro price of smaller capacity units is a bit on the high side

Pricing:

Intro MSRP's:

  • 128GB  – $130 ($1.01/GB)
  • 256GB  – $230 ($0.90/GB)
  • 512GB  – $430 ($0.84/GB)
  • 1TB       – $730 ($0.71/GB)

Update (7/1/2014 @ 2:45AM EDT): Already, Samsung has updated their MSRP listings:

Warranty and Availability:

I wasn't kidding earlier. Samsung has so much confidence in the increased endurance of their V-NAND that they've upped the warranty to 10-years, rated at 40GB of writes per day, which equates to 150TB of total writes. The drives will be available for purchase on July 21st.

Final Thoughts:

The Samsung 850 PRO delivers on one of the potential answers to ever more difficult flash memory die shrinks. Instead of shrinking, Samsung actually expanded their process back up to 30nm and chose to go vertical! They plugged this new V-NAND into their existing controller technology and really made it sing. The structure and interface improvements of this new flash also go a long way to alleviate some of the small write speed issues seen on typical 2D NAND, making it very resilient to fragmentation over time, which should help out in RAID configurations lacking TRIM support. Overall I'm extremely impressed with the 850 PRO. The only fault I can really find is that intro pricing is a tad high, but to that I say here's hoping we seen an 850 EVO soon!

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