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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
Ever since our first discovery of the 470 Series SATA 2 SSD way back in 2010, Samsung has been unstoppable, carving out a new standard with every SSD release. The release of the 850 Pro SSD with 3D V-NAND is a perfect example of just that. Vertical NAND opens up a whole new world when we look at SSD endurance, density battery life for portables, and last but not least, SSD performance. Where we would have thought there was very little room to improve in SATA 3 performance, it seems like the Samsung 850 Pro is just stretching a bit to make space.
Somewhat interesting is the fact that, some time ago, Samsung restructured availability of their NAND flash memory, putting it in the hands of big names such as IBM and EMC², and keeping it out of the hands of their competition. This plays for a very interesting perspective where the game has now changed and Samsung seems to have little or no competition. Understanding that competitors are hard at work fine tuning their own variation of 3D V-NAND, Samsung seems to be alone in the sandbox for the time being. If you thought that Samsung was a big fish before their sales of smartphones alone spanned every second of the day, wait for it because a new door may have just opened for Samsung.
Looking closely at the Samsung 850 Pro, we have a new release SSD that has topped every benchmark conducted, bettering the next best in our Vantage chart by almost 2K points. The performance is just that good. We never figured we would ever hit 163MB/s on low 4K write performance. Compound this with low power specs that translate to longer portable battery life, guaranteed endurance that enables a 10 years warranty, and all that we have left in this equation is the price.
Pre-Orders for the Samsung 850 Pro start this morning and we might see shipping start as soon as 14 Jul 14. MSRP is $129.99 (128GB), $229.99 (256GB), $429.99 (512GB, and $729.99 (1TB) and if you can grab one at that price, do it! Like we have seen so many times before, price-bumping will most likely occur as retail outlets take advantage of short supply/high demand with their initial shipments.
With the 850 Pro comes a new technology that has already been proven, incredible performance, capacity, endurance and a 10 year warranty. When you also include the Samsung Magician, we tap on RAPID, the ability to upgrade firmware and complete a secure erase of the SSD, as well as the ability to set your own custom level of over provisioning. The 850 Pro just may be the most deserving candidate for Editor’s Choice that we have seen to date.
Watch For Samsung 850 SSD Pricing at Amazon!
Check Out Our 850 Pro 128GB Review Here!
waahhhh a price point would be nice as well
Pricing is listed in the article….thanks ahead!
Not worth the price premium IMO. I don’t care much about SSDs faster than the Crucial M550 or Samsung 830 Evo until the interface becomes faster (ie. SATA Express next year)
> Each chip has a RAW value of 128GB
That is wrong. you will find different types of flash chips on both sides of the ssd:
16 x 86 GBit = 172 GByte x 4 = 688 GByte
8 x 86 GBit = 86 GByte x 4 = 344 GByte
Sum: 1032 GByte
So basicly inside the packages there is no need for stacked dies, since there are already so many tranzistors packed on each other.. Is this correct or can 3D nand have multiple dies aswell ?
It looks like this drive is the new king – of SATA 3 drives. That and well, it seems to be bottlenecked by SATA 3. I imagine an XP941-like drive with V-NAND would be awesome.
I’m not sure what to make of it though.
– PCI-E, M.2, and likely SATA Express drives will probably be faster
– Among the PCI-E drives, well, the MX100 is offering literally double as much storage for the same price, assuming these MSRPs are to be believed
Other issues.
– Then there’s the risk of V-NAND issues if things don’t work out
– On the upside, if it does, well V-NAND because it’s using a bigger process than the others, ought to have pretty awesome endurance. We are looking at 40 nm V-NAND here.
Hmm … at 20 nm, the amount of storage available in a few years ought to be like 16Tb? Especially if they get more layers of V-NAND on the chips.
Hopefully samsung brings this to mainstream drives aswell. It would be awsome to see a MX100 killer 🙂
No supercaps on this model ???
No supercaps…
Hmmm, now I’m wondering if this V-NAND has power issues and can’t be driven by supercap level current if the need arises..
You gave a 5 star for performance of the Sandisk Extreme Pro.
https://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/sandisk-extreme-pro-ssd-review/
And Samsung 850 Pro is MUCH! FASTER and MUC MORE POWERFUL! than the Sandisk Extreme Pro.
https://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.thessdreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/616x612x850-pro-Vantage-Chart.png.pagespeed.ic.jg-AKOvhBV.jpg
But you give only 4.5 star for the performance of Samsung 850 Pro.
I do not trust the Honesty of your reviews any more.
After updating to Magician 4.4 last night and enabling RAPID, my 840 EVO reads at nearly 8GB/s. Again, not sure if it’s real-world noticeable, but maps seem to load PFQ.
My 1TB EVO 840 was only $400, I don’t see paying the $320 or so difference for this drive. It’s not worth the extra money.
Where did you get the figures of 3W for active and .4W idle power consumption?
Official site is mum on the specifications so far.
https://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd850pro/overview.html
That would have come from documentation in our possession and received from Samsung.
What would be of great interest to many is the result of enterprise benchmarks (those used for 845DC Pro) run on 850 Pro that was formatted (overprovisioned) to match 845DC Pro capacity – i.e. to 400GB or 800GB.
If benchmark results are comparable, it seems possible to save tons of money by using 850 Pro in a more read-oriented server environments (lack of supercaps can be dealt with at the system – not SSD – level).
Any chance you can run those tests?
A 850 Pro 512 GB (with Rapid mode) or a M2 XP941 512 GB would be the most performant option for a new X99 build?
Absolutely the better of the two is the XP941 as it gives you that performance all the time and full throttle. RAPID is a caching program and acts only as such in certain scenarios.
Why is “The performance of this Crystal DiskMark result is the highest we have ever had, bar none”? Most of the results are lower than the 840 Pro, by almost half in the sequential results:
https://www.thessdreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/840-Pro-RAPID-Bench-Crystal-DiskMark.png
850’s results:
https://www.thessdreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Samsung-850-Pro-CDM.png
It would be nice if the results were all clear-cut (e.g. drive A is superior to drive B in every rating in every test) instead of the rock-paper-scissors game, but that’s the way it was for my 840 Pro pick to begin with.
Ummm… are you aware that you are comparing a single SSDs results to that of an SSD in RAPID mode which uses DRAM to increase performance? Totally different concept…
That would explain the difference. The original 840 Pro review displays scores that are still higher than the 850 Pro’s by some measurements, but no where near the RAPID scores. The 850 Pro has some of the RAPID scores posted near the end of the interview, but does not display the results of every test following enabling RAPID.
https://www.thessdreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/OptCDMRandom.png