Samsung SSD 850 EVO SATA Solid State Drive Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, December 08, 2014, 10:55 AM EDT

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Our Summary and Conclusion

Performance Summary: The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO 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 depth 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 also put up excellent numbers in the trace-based PCMark 7 tests, trailing only the higher-end Samsung SSD 850 PRO.

Samsung SSD 850 EVO Solid State Drives -- Find Them At Amazon

If you go back and look at all of the numbers, the Samsung SSD 850 EVO is a clear winner in terms of performance. The 500GB 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 sibling, the SSD 850 PRO.

As has been the case for a few previous launches, Samsung has set the suggested retail prices on the SSD 850 EVO drives a bit on the high side…

120GB: $99.99
250GB: $149.99
500GB: $269.99
1TB: $499.99

The 128GB drive comes in at about $0.83 per GB, while the 1TB drive lands at about $0.49 per GB. Versus drives like the Crucial M550 series, Samsung is suggesting a small premium, but the increased performance 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.

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. Ultimately, the Samsung SSD 850 EVO series seems to have it all. The drive we tested offered very strong performance, it has a relatively long warranty, competitive pricing, and a high endurance rating. You can’t ask for much more in a solid state drive.