Samsung 850 Pro

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
andyb
Patron of SPCR
Posts: 3307
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 12:00 pm
Location: Essex, England

Samsung 850 Pro

Post by andyb » Tue Jul 01, 2014 6:22 am

This is a monster.

Its got killer performance, amazing consistency, a 10-year warranty and industry beating write endurance, the only let down is its hefty pricetag, but if you want all of its benefits I am sure you will stump up the extra cash - actual retail price is unknown as the drive is not destined to be released until the 21st July 2014.

Enjoy the review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/sams ... the-3d-era


Andy

Abula
Posts: 3662
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:22 pm
Location: Guatemala

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by Abula » Tue Jul 01, 2014 7:14 am

Complementing the anandtech review,

TheSSDReview Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review – Showing Off With 3D V-NAND
TweakTown Samsung 850 Pro 128GB SSD Review
Toms Hardware Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: 3D Vertical NAND Hits Desktop Storage
TechSpot Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review

Seems the best SSD in the market with the Sandisk Extreme Pro, but i would give the edge to samsung producing all the components. But im not sure its worth it, probably for people with higher loads might be, but Samsung 840evo seems like a good compromise between prefromance and price, and the Crucial MX100 seems like the best option for value ssds, that to justify the price for what you get, imo not worth it on the 850 Pro. And investing so much money into an ssd atm for me its not worth it, having sata express and m.2 around the corner to hit mainstream on desktops.

dhanson865
Posts: 2198
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 11:20 am
Location: TN, USA

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by dhanson865 » Tue Jul 01, 2014 12:24 pm

Abula wrote:And investing so much money into an ssd atm for me its not worth it, having sata express and m.2 around the corner to hit mainstream on desktops.
There are years worth of old laptops/netbooks/whatever they want to call them this year out there with no sata express or m.2 connectors. Still plenty of PCs to speed up with a fresh SSD.

Heck even looking forward to this falls refresh look at http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/mod ... .MLDAA.005 which hasn't even been released yet and tell me what format other than SATA makes sense?

Abula
Posts: 3662
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:22 pm
Location: Guatemala

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by Abula » Tue Jul 01, 2014 1:30 pm

dhanson865 wrote:
Abula wrote:And investing so much money into an ssd atm for me its not worth it, having sata express and m.2 around the corner to hit mainstream on desktops.
There are years worth of old laptops/netbooks/whatever they want to call them this year out there with no sata express or m.2 connectors. Still plenty of PCs to speed up with a fresh SSD.

Heck even looking forward to this falls refresh look at http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/mod ... .MLDAA.005 which hasn't even been released yet and tell me what format other than SATA makes sense?
I didn't say investing on an SSD is not worth it, nor i said old hardware wont benefit from an SSD, what i tried to say is "investing so much money" into an expensive SSD like the 850pro imo is not worth it, when you have cheaper alternatives like MX100 or 840evo, where you can live fine the transition toward the new formats.

CA_Steve
Moderator
Posts: 7650
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:36 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by CA_Steve » Tue Jul 01, 2014 2:23 pm

Yep, it's pretty. Nope, I don't need the performance for my use. I'm happy to see Samsung nailing performance consistency with so little overprovisioning and also very happy to see the great speeds at the smallest size. Hopefully, we'll see an EVO/lower cost version in the near future. Did you note it uses the same MEX controller as the 840 EVO?

quest_for_silence
Posts: 5275
Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:12 am
Location: ITALY

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by quest_for_silence » Tue Jul 01, 2014 2:47 pm

dhanson865 wrote:Still plenty of PCs to speed up with a fresh SSD.

In a typical consumer scenario, can you really appreciate the difference between an Intel X-25M and (to say) any contemporary Samsung/Crucial? SSDs are much more like commodities, nowadays.

xan_user
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 2269
Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 9:09 am
Location: Northern California.

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by xan_user » Tue Jul 01, 2014 5:05 pm

id love to see some better hybrid options, instead of just more speed (that I wont notice).

boost
Posts: 661
Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:29 am
Location: de_DE

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by boost » Tue Jul 01, 2014 10:36 pm

Only one review (Googlenglish) mentioned that this ssd produces a lot of electrical noise (buzzing, hissing) when its accessed and some crackling even when idling.
Could be a problem with a preproduction sample for the reviews.

dhanson865
Posts: 2198
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 11:20 am
Location: TN, USA

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Jul 02, 2014 9:00 am

quest_for_silence wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:Still plenty of PCs to speed up with a fresh SSD.

In a typical consumer scenario, can you really appreciate the difference between an Intel X-25M and (to say) any contemporary Samsung/Crucial? SSDs are much more like commodities, nowadays.
I agree they are nearly commodities, I don't agree that "sata express" or "m.2" connectors will be common in the systems I'm working on on a daily basis any time soon.

My response was mostly about sata vs new connectors that systems don't have yet. Desktops are the minority nowadays, most desktops don't have "sata express" connectors, and m.2 format drives don't exist in the majority of past, present, and near future laptops.

Now as to the x-25M say we pick the 80GB version and compare to a 256GB version of the 850 Pro or a ~512GB version of the cheaper drives (capacity might vary). You are talking about write speeds that are roughly 8-10 times faster in the newer higher capacity drive. Yes I think even 5 times faster writes would be noticeable for day to day use. The extra capacity and controller/firmware changes also give you better write consistency so you won't have that user complaining that their drive got slower as the months went by.

I could go on but its enough to say that I both see an improvement with newer drives making it worth having them and see the cost difference as being significant. Every person/company has to make decisions on upgrade/replacement cycles based on too many factors to make it into any simple conditional statement.

dhanson865
Posts: 2198
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 11:20 am
Location: TN, USA

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Jul 02, 2014 9:49 am

All the modern SSDs are faster than I care about for reads, it comes down to write speeds when I compare low capacity drives

$215 Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 500 MBps writes
$115 Crucial MX100 256GB SATA 300 MBps writes

$200 Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SATA 520 MBps writes
$105 Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SATA 390 MBps writes (real deal, no caching dependency)

$260 Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SATA 520 MBps writes (at this capacity the write speeds advertised are more believable)
$130 Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SATA 520 MBps writes (advertised, depends on caching scheme I'm not fond of)

$230 Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SATA 520 MBps writes
$130 Samsung 850 Pro 128GB SATA 470 MBps writes (advertised, how much of this is the new caching? Looks like a marketing gimmick to me.)


seriously I don't have to stick with Samsung, if you give me a cheap enough price on a Crucial MX100 I can see jumping on it. Maybe there are other drives worth considering but in my mindset I don't consider the EVO drives, I'll take the performance advantage of the corresponding Pro drive (in price comparison not capacity).

So to me the comparison is more like

$115 Crucial MX100 256GB SATA 300 MBps writes
$105 Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SATA 390 MBps writes (real deal, no caching dependency)
$130 Samsung 850 Pro 128GB SATA 470 MBps writes (advertised, new caching)

I'd give up the capacity difference and take one of the 128GB Pro drives for the performance unless the MX100 gets cheaper than both the 840 Pro and 850 Pro.

$215 Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 500 MBps writes
$200 Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SATA 520 MBps writes
$230 Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SATA 520 MBps writes

again I'd go for the cheapest of the 3 drives in this comparison even if that means having half the capacity to get the pro drive.

But I wouldn't rule out the mx100 if it went on sale and I wouldn't speak negatively if you or anyone else took the MX100 as the better deal with a capacity over performance preference.

In fact that is why I don't consider the EVO drives, the MX100 is a better deal when it comes to price/capacity. So to me Samsung loses the comparison on price/capacity basis.

The reality in my use is that I don't tend to fill up my drives, year after year, decade after decade HDs and SSDs have always exceeded my need for local storage. If you never seem to have enough disk space you should grab the better deal for your usage.

quest_for_silence
Posts: 5275
Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:12 am
Location: ITALY

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by quest_for_silence » Wed Jul 02, 2014 1:11 pm

dhanson865 wrote:Yes I think even 5 times faster writes would be noticeable for day to day use.

In my experience it isn't so: I swapped several X-25M 160Gb with the Seagate SSD 600 480Gb, and didn't notice anything striking in daily use, and the same happened when I swapped a couple of OCZ Vector 2 50Gb (34nm) with the Crucial M500 240Gb.

And that's why I endorse Abula's advice: those 850 Pro and the likes are just too much expensive for what they offer (I'm talking just about the SATA 6Gb version), and there are no compelling reasons to prefer them over the about half-much cheaper Crucial MX100s (or Samsung EVOs) in any consumer scenario.

dhanson865
Posts: 2198
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 11:20 am
Location: TN, USA

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Jul 02, 2014 2:46 pm

quest_for_silence wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:Yes I think even 5 times faster writes would be noticeable for day to day use.

In my experience it isn't so: I swapped several X-25M 160Gb with the Seagate SSD 600 480Gb, and didn't notice anything striking in daily use
x-25m existed in Capacity 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB and there was it's little brother the 40GB drive that had the same controller and chips but was branded as either a x25-v or a Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB.

You had the top capacity drive with the best write speeds and the least issues of the line. If you had been using the 40GB or 80GB version and had then upgraded to a truly modern drive you would have noticed it.

As was you went from 100 MB/s on the 160GB drive with IOPS to spare/good caching to 300 MB/s or so on the 480GB drive* meaning that 480GB drive is still way slower than the drives we are discussing today. You didn't get a jump of 5 times the write speeds you got a jump of 2 or 3 times the write speeds if that much (*I'd argue that in their respective time periods the Intel was the better drive).

If you make the jump now from a 480GB drive of old to a modern 500GB/512GB drive you'll get another jump in speed but nothing like what I'm talking about. It's the people still on rotating disks or on old 40GB/64GB/80GB early generation SSDs jumping all the way to a modern drive that are going to see the bigger jumps in speed.

And if you didn't look at the specs of that Acer laptop I posted it has a 500GB hard drive - as in rotating disks - as in slow enough that any modern drive like the Crucial MX100 would be a huge change.

Pappnaas
Posts: 726
Joined: Mon May 16, 2011 11:23 am
Location: Germany

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by Pappnaas » Wed Jul 02, 2014 9:24 pm

@dhanson865

You're totally right about the speed-thing. The difference is huge.

The question is, in everyday consumer use, who would notice those differences and in which scenario? Most people won't, that is my experience so far.

quest_for_silence
Posts: 5275
Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:12 am
Location: ITALY

Re: Samsung 850 Pro

Post by quest_for_silence » Wed Jul 02, 2014 9:47 pm

dhanson865 wrote:As was you went from 100 MB/s on the 160GB drive with IOPS to spare/good caching to 300 MB/s or so on the 480GB drive* meaning that 480GB drive is still way slower than the drives we are discussing today.

I don't know where did you pick your figures, but whether the X25-M did those 100MB/s (so sequential write, random write was much lower, around 35MB/S at best), the Seagate do around 440MB/s (260MB/S at random write), while contemporary top end competitors like the 512Gb Samsung 840 Pro do around 490MB/s (290MB/S random: so within an about 10% margin): definitely you're plainly wrong. If you mind, you may also easily compare that newest Samsung 850 Pro write performances to the Seagate ones on that link (all the above data come from the relevant Anandtech reviews, anyway).

Well, in my experience a write speed bump around 5x (actually around 4,4x, sir, but 7,4x per random write) doesn't mean at all what you are saying.

Given that, any other comment is useless, as you just don't read (or you're not able to understand) other people points (Abula's one, mine).

Post Reply