Samsung SSD 850 Pro - 3D NAND Arrives

Name: Samsung SSD 850 Pro - 3D NAND Arrives
Brand: Samsung

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 30, 2014, 10:00 PM EDT

Performance Summary: Samsung’s new SSD 850 PRO drives performed extremely well throughout our battery of benchmarks. The drives performed well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred had little to no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depth were quite competitive. Small file transfers with low queues depths, however—which is what you’d expect to see with most client workloads—were particularly impressive. These new Samsung SSD 850 PRO drives also raced into the lead in the trace-based PCMark 7 tests, which are more "real-world" workloads arguably versus our fully synthetic benchmarks.

The Samsung SSD 850 PRO Series -- Find Them At Amazon.Com

Looking back through the benchmarks, it’s clear that Samsung’s new SSD 850 PRO series is a winner in terms of performance. The drives led the pack almost across the board, which is quite impressive in light of competing drives from Intel, Crucial, and others. The strong performance offered by the drives, comes at a cost, however.

As you can see in the chart above, Samsung has set the suggested retail prices on these drives a bit on the high side. The 128GB drive comes in at about $1 per GB, while the 1TB drive lands at about $0.73 per GB. Versus drives like the recently released Crucial M550 series, Samsung is charging quite a bit of a premium, but the increased performance, warranty, and endurance rating somewhat justifies the cost. We should also mention that street prices may be lower once availability ramps up.

We don’t have any sort of track record to reference with Samsung’s new 3D V-NAND, but the company seems confident in its reliability, as evidenced by the high endurance rating and 10 year warranty on these drives. All in all, the Samsung SSD 850 series has it all--strong performance, a long warranty, and high endurance. That's a winning combination in our book.


Strong Performance High Endurance Long Warranty	Somewhat Pricey No Power Loss Protection

Tags: Samsung, SSD, Storage, SATA, solid state, 850 PRO

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com