Samsung 850 Evo SSD: High-performance, durable 3D NAND hits the mainstream

[exitrade]

Samsung has announced imminent arrival of the 850 Evo SSD — the first mainstream SSD that uses 3D NAND. Thanks to its fancy 3D NAND tech, the 850 Evo is one of the fastest SSDs on the market — and the longevity and reliability of 3D NAND TLC flash cells is so much better than standard planar NAND flash that Samsung offers the 850 Evo with a five-year warranty. There is one problem with the 850 Evo, however: It isn’t priced quite right for a mainstream drive.

As you may already know, the Samsung 850 Pro — especially with RAPID RAM caching enabled — is by far the best SSD money can buy. The 850 Pro’s combination of performance and durability (a 10-year warranty!) mean that nothing else really comes close. The one caveat, of course, is price — the 1TB 850 Pro will set you back around $650, while you can pick up a decent 1TB SanDisk Ultra II or Crucial M550 for about $450. The higher price is due to Samsung’s use of 3D NAND — a new breed of flash memory that, so far at least, isn’t produced by anyone else.

The purpose of the 850 Evo, then, is to bring 3D NAND (sometimes known as vertical NAND or V-NAND) to a lower, value/mainstream price point — but it doesn’t quite get there. The 850 Evo hasn’t yet hit retailers, but the 1TB drive has an MSRP of $500 — or about 10% higher than what other mainstream 1TB drives are currently going for on Newegg; the 512GB drive, at $270 MSRP, is about 15% over other mainstream drives.

Samsung 850 Evo benchmark [image credit: Anandtech]

For those extra dollars, you get a drive that’s around 10-20% faster than the cheaper SanDisk or Crucial SSD, and much higher durability. According to Samsung, the use of 3D NAND gives the 850 Evo a massive 2,000 program/erase (P/E) cycles per cell — which, unless you like to torture your SSDs in cruel and unusual ways, will give you a drive life expectancy that’s well beyond the five-year warranty. For light’ish workloads, you could even see decades of life out of an 850 Evo. Don’t forget, this is TLC 3D NAND we’re talking about, too; not the larger, more expensive, even-more-reliable two-bit MLC 3D NAND that Samsung used in the 850 Pro.

Read: SSD shadiness: Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews

All in all, then, the 850 Evo looks like a very strong drive — but the slightly-above-mainstream pricing puts it in odd position. On the one hand, early benchmarks point to the 850 Evo being the best consumer-class drive that money can buy (except for the 850 Pro). On the other hand, most consumers will be more than happy with a cheaper SSD. The truth is, most modern SSDs are pretty good — a 10 or 20% difference in performance, when you’re talking about throughput in the 300-400MB/sec range, is really not that significant. Maybe when software catches up with the massive performance provided by SSDs, then it’ll be worth spending a little more — but for now, only power users will likely notice much of a difference.

NAND flash chip – such beautiful regularity

The other option, of course, is that 850 Pro might actually end up being sold at the same price as the SanDisk Ultra II and Crucial M550 — right now we only have the MSRPs; the actual sale price could be lower. If you can actually get a 1TB 850 Evo SSD for about $430, then there’ll be very little reason to buy any other drive.

There’s no word on when the 850 Evo will actually go on sale, but it should be soon. The MSRPs are: $100 for 128GB, $150 for 256GB, $270 for 512GB, and $500 for 1TB. All drives have a five-year warranty, with the 1TB and 512GB drives being the best options, performance-wise. The three smaller models of the 850 Evo have a new Samsung MGX controller, while the 1TB model has the MEX controller from the 840 Evo and 850 Pro.

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[The Owl]

don't know where your getting your info but the Evo is a limited three year warranty whereas the Pro is a Ten year one so really for the bit extra the longer warranty is worth it IMHO

BTW I have running here 1 x 840 Pro 1 x 850 and 1 x 850 Pro the 850 really cooks IMHO

[nIGHT]

Very expensive so I won't buy it. :(

[R0H1T]

don't know where your getting your info but the Evo is a limited three year warranty whereas the Pro is a Ten year one so really for the bit extra the longer warranty is worth it IMHO

BTW I have running here 1 x 840 Pro 1 x 850 and 1 x 850 Pro the 850 really cooks IMHO

This is the new EVO (based on 3d/stacked NAND) & so it does have the 5yrs limited warranty unlike its previous version based on planar 1x nm NAND :showoff:

It'll also probably outlast any other planar MLC NAND based drives out there, such is the reliability/endurance of these drives. See this ~ http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

For instance all drives tested were on a substantially smaller node (NAND) with lesser P/E cycles than the two 850 variants.

Very expensive so I won't buy it. :(

The price will fall sharply, in fact you can expect it to drop 50% within a year (as compared to the MSRP @ launch) as IMFT & Sandisk/Toshiba introduce their 3D NAND in 2015 & 2016 respectively :lol:

[The Owl]

AND THE PRO HAS TEN!!!

The Samsung SSD880 PRO is a high performance SSD designed for power users. Capable of delivering up to 100,000 IOPS Random Read Speed and 550MB/s Sequential Read speed, it is an SSD of unrivaled high performance. Even better, the advanced MEX controller delivers these speeds regardless of data type, unlike some competing controllers that greatly favor compressible data.

- Capacity: 128GB
- Sequential Read: 550MB/s
- Sequential Write: 470MB/s
- Random Read (QD1, 4KB): 10,000 IOPS
- Random Write (QD1, 4KB): 36,000 IOPS
- Random Read (QD32, 4KB): 100,000 IOPS
- Random Write (QD32, 4KB): 90,000 IOPS
- Warranty: 10 Year

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/120gbto200gb/mz-7ke128bw.html

I just linked the 128 but they are the same across the Pro Range and they are just a tad faster

[nIGHT]

Very expensive so I won't buy it. :(

The price will fall sharply, in fact you can expect it to drop 50% within a year (as compared to the MSRP @ launch) as IMFT & Sandisk/Toshiba introduce their 3D NAND in 2015 & 2016 respectively :lol:

Until then I'll keep my money... B)