Samsung SSD 850 Pro - 3D NAND Arrives

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

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Our Summary and Conclusion

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.