Samsung 850 EVO and Pro 2TB SSD Review – 2TB SSDs Make their Entry

If you look back over the past several years, there have always been three constants that needed to be addressed in order for SSDs to become a viable consumer solution to storage; value, reliability and capacity.  One of our first SSD reviews was on an MTron 32GB SSD with a whopping price tag of more than $1500…and they sold!  Both value and reliability have come along and, I guess, capacity has for the most part as well since we can get a 1TB SSD for under $500.  Settling into the digital age logically means that we have much more pictures, videos and music to store and many find that even 1TB is not enough. Along comes Samsung with the 2TB Pro and EVO SSDs.

Both the Samsung Pro and the Samsung EVO go on sale very soon in a 2TB capacity and the only way a company could have reached this capacity point in a typical notebook SSD is with 3D V-NAND technology. 3D V-NAND memory has the ability to increase capacity through stacking 32 cell layers on top of one another vice beside, resulting in a higher density and better performance in a smaller footprint.  Would you believe Samsung could fit 4TB of memory into the same notebook SSD Case?  That is a fact as the PCB in use is much smaller than the typical PCB in both length and width.

The MSRP for the 2TB versions of the Samsung Pro and EVO is $799.99 and $999.99 (Check Amazon Now) bringing the price point of SSDs down to an incredible low of .39/GB and that is at MSRP.  Performance of the pro is listed at 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write with the EVO only differing by 10MB/s read at 540MB/s. IOPS for both are very similar and up around the 100K mark, however, different capacities of both do account for different performance somewhat:

SAMSUNG 850 PRO

SAMSUNG 850 EVO

Both the Pro and EVO have full TRIM support, Garbage Collection, S.M.A.R.T. attributes, AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption which is expected as both use the same controller. The only difference between both SSDs is whether it is 3D-VNAND two or three bit memory. Also, the 850 Pro has the maroon square on its exterior, whereas the EVO’s is gray.

As the 850 EVO uses 3-Bit MLC 3D V-NAND memory, its TBW (terabytes written) rating is 150TBW, whereas the 850 Pro is double that at 300TBW.  Conversely, the 850 EVO has a slight advantage in power ratings at 3.3W average/3.4W maximum with the 850 Pro at 3.7W average/4.7W maximum.

The 850 EVO has a five-year warranty where the Pro doubles that to 10 years.

COMPONENTS

Neither of the Samsung 850 PCBs are full size and each measures 2.75″ long by 2″ wide.  Both contain the same 3-core SATA 3 controller bearing product number S4LP052X01-8030 and this specific controller resembles that of the lower capacity models but has been modified for the higher 2TB capacity. Both also contain 4 chips of 3D-VNAND memory on each side, each chip representing 256GB of RAW capacity.

CLICK ON PICTURES FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES.

SAMSUNG 850 PRO

The sole difference between these two SSDs is the memory.  The 850 Pro contains 2-Bit MLC, whereas the EVO contains 3-Bit MLC (as Samsung likes to term it).  Both have an available capacity of 1908GB once formatted.

SAMSUNG 850 EVO

Another first on the 2TB 850 Series SSD is that both are the first in the industry to contain 2GB DRAM Cache memory chips. Let’s take a look at how the memory chips differ by product number, the 850 pro on the left and the 850EVO on the right:

For the purpose of our benchmarks today, we will test the 850 Pro followed by the 850 EVO.   Just as a bit of a heads up, the performance of both is very similar.