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)
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):
- 128GB – $119.99 USD ($0.94/GB) – Amazon Link
- 256GB – $186.87 USD ($0.73/GB) – Amazon Link
- 512GB – $374.24 USD ($0.73/GB) – Amazon Link
- 1TB – $645.22 USD ($0.63/GB) – Amazon Link
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.
Sticking with Editor's Choice, this time for the superior write performance at 256GB and 128GB capacities.
These new charts are not the
These new charts are not the easiest to read.
Slightly larger text and solid colored bars would help a lot.
I second this. I find them
I second this. I find them very hard to read. The bar charts are okay because they are all in order, but when they wonder around like the line graphs, they’re practically illegible. Add in the mislabeled axies and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be reading.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Not the easiest graphs to
Not the easiest graphs to read!
Background color hinder very much.
It looks like you mislabeled
It looks like you mislabeled the X axis on the PCPer File Copy Test charts. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be “seconds” rather than “MB/s”.
Agreed. Also, i’m pretty sure
Agreed. Also, i’m pretty sure that for the “IO Meter Average Transaction Time” lower – not higher – should be better.
Thanks for the catch, I’ve
Thanks for the catch, I've re-uploaded corrected versions, and expanded the QD out to 8 on these to more easily see where the drives are headed. Expanding it further would make the lower part of the scale harder to read.
Yeah, I almost went out and
Yeah, I almost went out and bought an ADATA SP610 in 128GB. 🙂 That thing beat everyone!
Got it. Fixed the axis label
Got it. Fixed the axis label on file creation and copy charts. Thanks for reporting this.
Look at how much extra room
Look at how much extra room is available in that 2.5in casing for the 512 and 1tb models! Going with full 16 layer packages and filling up the remaining space with them could yield a 2.5 inch SSD in excess of 3TB. O_O
This tech needs to hurry up and get fully commoditized so Samsung has an incentive to make drives that size and we can actually buy them at reasonable prices. Doing so would put a few more well earned nails in the HDD makers coffins.
hey Allyn when are you
hey Allyn when are you getting the intel 750 pci-e ssd? supposed to be out in Q4 and well… its Q4 now!
Possible error with the YAPT
Possible error with the YAPT chart. Shows queue depth on the bottom when it should be block size(or whatever the correct term would be). Regardless, interesting new benchmark along with a great article.
Fixed, and thanks!
Fixed, and thanks!
I’m wondering, can these
I’m wondering, can these drives perform any faster if connected to 12gb/s SAS ports?
The controller and connector
The controller and connector do not support SAS 12Gbit/sec. Even if connected to an appropriate HBA, the link would fall back to 6Gbit SATA.
As usual I’m late to posting
As usual I’m late to posting comments, but in case anyone notices my post: I have not found any source at Samsung or here where it addresses some sort of “hold-up” protection on the power line in case of a PSU failure. Anyone know?