Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts

Conclusion:

PROS:

  • Outstanding performance, especially at lower capacities
  • Excellent fragmentation resiliency in higher capacities
  • 10 Year Warranty

CONS:

  • Pricing runs higher than competing units (but you get what you pay for)

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Pricing:

Intro MSRP's:

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

Current pricing (at time of writing):

Warranty and Availability:

Warranty period of the 850 Pro is 10-years, rated at 40GB of writes per day (150TB total writes). Samsung is very confident in the endurance of their V-NAND.

Final Thoughts:

By shifting to VNAND technology, Samsung has worked around the potential shrinkage limits of 2D Planar NAND by bypassing those limits entirely. A side effect of this move is that cells are spaced further apart, meaning less cell to cell interference during write operations, ultimately resulting in write speeds significantly faster than 2D NAND is capable of. While competing SSDs see write speeds as low as 150MB/sec at a 128GB capacity point, the smaller per-die capacity and higher performance of Samsung's VNAND enable ~3x the write performance at that same 128GB capacity, nearly saturating the SATA interface. For the best SATA performance in an SSD, the 850 Pro is my go to recommendation. My only reservation is the pricing, which has remained at a cost/GB consistently higher than competing units since it has launched. Fear not, as a lower cost version is on the near horizon, and the added speed boost of an SLC cache on this new VNAND can only be a good thing, especially at a lower cost of a soon to launch 850 EVO. That said, the 850 Pro will remain the only model capable of such high continuous (uncached) write speeds at smaller SSD capacities.

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Sticking with Editor's Choice, this time for the superior write performance at 256GB and 128GB capacities.

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