Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA and M.2 Drives Reviewed
Our Summary and Conclusion
Performance Summary: When we closed out our review of the 2.5" Samsung SSD 850 EVO, we said, “...the 500GB drive we tested performed extremely well throughout our battery of tests. The drive performed well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depths were excellent. Small file transfers with low queues depths, which is what you’d expect to see with most client workloads, were also very good. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives put up excellent numbers in the trace-based PCMark 7 tests too, trailing only the higher-end Samsung SSD 850 PRO.” All of that remain true with today’s launch of the mSATA and M.2 variants of the drives. These things are essentially mirror images of their 2.5” counterparts but in "gumstick" packages.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Solid State Drives -- Find Them At Amazon
Looking back at the numbers, the Samsung’s SSD 850 EVO mSATA and M.2 drives are clear winners in terms of performance. The 500GB M.2 model that we tested wasn’t quite the fastest drive across the board, but it scored its fair share of wins, and when it trailed, it was usually only slightly behind its more expensive SSD 850 PRO cousin. The same rings true for the 1TB mSATA drive.
Samsung has set the suggested retail prices on these new mSATA and M.2 SSD 850 EVO drives a bit more aggressively than it did with its 2.5” launch...
The 120GB drives (in both mSATA and M.2 flavors) come in at about $0.67 per GB, while the 1TB M.2 drive lands at about $0.45 per GB. Versus drives like the Crucial’s M550 series, Samsung is asking a small premium, but the increased performance of these drives somewhat justifies the cost. We should also mention that street prices tend to be lower once availability ramps up, so there may be no premium at all in time.
In the conclusion of our review of Samsung’s 2.5” SSD 850 EVOs, we also said that “We don’t have much of a track record with Samsung’s 3D V-NAND since it is relatively new to the market, but the company seems confident in its reliability, as evidenced by the high endurance rating on the SSD 850 EVO series and the 5 year warranty on these drives.” We’re a few months in now, which isn’t very long, but we’ve had no trouble with any SSD 850 EVOs at this point, over all of our testing and benchmark workloads.
In the end, the Samsung SSD 850 EVO series seems cater to the enthusiast storage segment nicely. The drives we tested offered strong performance, and have relatively long warranties, competitive pricing, and high endurance ratings. That’s just about all you could ask for on a consumer-class solid state drive.
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