Samsung has been very aggressive over the last few years on the solid-state drive (SSD) front. The company has been taking good advantage of its broad range of component-making abilities to stay on the cutting edge of SSD performance while often undercutting the price of the competition. Those companies often have to buy flash memory or drive controllers (or both) from other component makers. Samsung has it all in-house.
The SSD 850 Pro, the company's new flagship drive for consumer-level enthusiasts, follows on from last year's SSD 840 Pro and continues the company's excellent record on the SSD front. The SSD 850 Pro delivered the best performance we've seen overall in our benchmark testing from a 2.5-inch SATA SSD to date, alongside the longest warranty we've seen on a consumer drive (10 years, or 150TB written to the drive, whichever comes first).
The drive's write durability comes thanks to its 3D NAND memory (V-NAND is Samsung's name for it), a first for consumer SSDs. Instead of stacking all the memory cells side-by-side, V-NAND also stacks storage cells vertically (hence the "V"). This allows the company to pack more storage onto the drive (our review model was a 1TB model), while keeping speed and endurance high.
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The only real issue is cost. At $200 for the 256GB version of the SSD 850 Pro, $400 for the 500GB version, and $699 for the 1TB top-tier model Samsung sent us for testing, the SSD 850 Pro is far from cheap on a cost-per-gigabyte basis. Considering its stellar performance, we wouldn't exactly say it's overpriced—for example, Intel's business-focused SSD 2500 Pro Series was, at the time of this writing, only slightly cheaper despite its lower scores in our benchmark tests and a shorter five-year warranty.
That said, if you don't need a near-ironclad guarantee that your solid-state drive should last the better part of a decade, and you can live with somewhat lower (but still very fast) speeds, Crucial's mainstream MX100 drive is a fine alternative. You can land one for under $110 in the 256GB capacity, or about $210 if you double that up to 512GB. Even if you need nearly 1TB of solid-state storage in one drive, like in our test drive, another Crucial drive family, the Crucial M550 comes in a 960GB variety for under $430—a whole lot less than the SSD 850 Pro's $699 asking price for almost the same capacity. And those Crucial drives are still quite speedy. (We tested the 512GB and 256GB versions of the MX100 drive; we have a joint review of them in the works.)
Yes, the Samsung SSD 850 Pro is the fastest consumer SATA SSD you can buy at the moment. Yes, it has the longest warranty we've seen for a consumer drive. But unless you absolutely need the best performance available, you can save a whole lot of money by opting for a recent Crucial SSD, or for Samsung's own fast and more affordable SSD 840 EVO drive.
Design and Features
The Samsung SSD 850 Pro comes housed in a black metal shell that, much like most recent drives we've seen, is 7mm thick to better accommodate thin laptops and ultrabooks. (Some drives come in a 9mm-thick form factor, nowadays less common, that won't fit in certain laptop designs.)
Unlike many SSDs, which have tend to show lesser performance and endurance the further you go down the capacity ladder in a given line, the SSD 850 Pro comes with the same 10-year/150TB write-endurance rating, whether you opt for the 128GB base model, the 1TB drive we tested, or either of the two capacities in between (256GB or 512GB). Samsung's rated sequential read/write performance remains steady at 550MB per second for reads and 520MB per second for writes, until you drop to the 128GB drive. On that drive, the rated read speeds stay the same, but writes drop to a still-quick 470MB per sec.
If you're a business client or IT professional, you'll be intrigued to learn that the SSD 850 Pro includes support for 256-bit hardware encryption, supporting Opal 2.0 and Microsoft's eDrive platforms, just like Intel's Pro 2500 Series. Intel's drives, though, also add support for Intel's vPro remote-management technology. That said, considering vPro support is only advertised with a few Intel SSDs, we suspect plenty of business clients have found ways to live without it when implementing SSDs in existing systems en masse.
Our review drive of the SSD 850 Pro shipped with just the drive and a paper warranty pamphlet and quick-start guide. But Samsung also sells its drives slightly more accessorized with laptop or desktop "upgrade kits"; these might include a 2.5-to-3.5-inch drive bracket for desktop cases or a SATA-to-USB adapter for laptop-drive cloning. Be on the lookout for those if you need accessories with your drive. They cost a bit more, and you can sometimes get the accessories separately for less elsewhere. But these kits are handy for landing you all you need for the upgrade when the drive arrives.
Software
It's also worth pointing out that Samsung's Magician and Data Migration Software for tweaking, migrating, and optimizing your drive, is the most attractive and intuitive SSD suite we've used, by far. You can live without it, and Intel offers some nice (though not quite as polished) SSD software, as well. But Samsung's SSD software is well worth taking the time to download—even if you don't think you need it.
One reason why: Another feature baked into Samsung's Magician suite is RAPID Mode, which caches data in unused parts of your system's RAM. Performance junkies and tweakers may get a kick out of RAPID Mode. It certainly looks impressive in benchmark testing, out of proportion to the real-world feel of using it day to day. But we don't consider it a major selling point or something we'd switch on and use all the time.
Modern operating systems already cache files in memory on their own. And storing massing amounts of files in RAM can be risky if your system happens to suddenly lose power. In our Performance section coming up, we didn't chart the drive using RAPID Mode, because on most benchmark tests, the results wind up showing essentially the speed of the RAM, rather than the speed of the SSD itself.
SSD Performance Basics
If you're new to the world of solid-state drives, a few things are worth noting when it comes to performance.
For starters: If you're upgrading from a standard spinning hard drive, any modern SSD will be a huge improvement, speeding up boot times and making programs launch faster. But today's high-end SSDs make use of a specific interface, SATA 3.0 (also called "6Gbps SATA"), to achieve maximum speed versus older, but still common, SATA 2 ports, which top out at 300MB per second. We test all our SSDs on a SATA 3.0-equipped testbed PC to show their full performance abilities. To get the most speed possible from modern drives, you'll need a system with SATA 3.0 capability, as well.
If your system is based on a recent Intel Haswell, Ivy Bridge, or Sandy Bridge processor (or a recent AMD CPU with one of the newer AMD chipsets), there's a very good chance that your laptop or desktop has the newer, faster interface. (The easiest ways to find out are to check with your system maker, or to find out the model of motherboard your PC has and check its specs online.)
If your system doesn't have a SATA 3.0 interface, there's little point in paying a premium for a drive with the maximum possible performance. SATA 3.0-capable drives will work just fine with previous-generation SATA ports, but there's scant reason to pay extra for drive speed that your system can't take advantage of. A basic drive will work just as well, in that SATA 3.0-less scenario.
One note before we jump into testing: In the interest of getting the best possible performance out of our test drives, we've shifted to testing with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver installed, rather than the standard Microsoft AHCI driver we've used in the past. In the charts below, the Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series and SSD 730 Series drives, OCZ's Vertex 460 and Vector 150, Crucial's M550 and MX100, and Samsung's 850 Pro were all tested with Intel's RST drivers. (In testing a host of drives with both drivers for comparison purposes, though, we've seldom seen a difference of more than 5 percent on any given test.)
10GB File Copy Test
Our 10GB File Copy Test employs a Computer Shopper-specific test folder that we use with every SSD we test. The 10GB worth of files are in a variety of sizes and types (including, but not exclusively, JPGs, Word documents, and video files).
In this real-world test, we first copy the test folder onto the SSD, which has been secure-erased and reformatted before the process begins. We then make a folder-to-folder copy of the file on the SSD itself, and time the process. We use the software TeraCopy to manage the file transfer and time the process precisely.
The SSD 850 Pro didn't start off leading the pack on this test. But at just 2 seconds behind the fastest drives we've tested, this was still a strong showing.
PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test
The Secondary Storage Test is a subtest under Futuremark's larger PCMark 7 benchmarking suite. It employs a different approach to drive testing than pure speed tests like AS-SSD, which we'll get to in a moment. PCMark 7 runs a series of scripted tasks typical of everyday PC operation and disk accesses. It measures app launches, video-conversion tasks, image import, operations in Windows Media Center, and more. The result is a proprietary numeric score; the higher the number, the better.
This score is useful in gauging general performance versus other drives. Note that, like with our 10GB File Copy Test, we secure-erase all SSDs using the utility Parted Magic before running PCMark 7's Secondary Storage Test.
This time, the SSD 850 Pro crept up to second place, ahead of the SSD 840 Pro it replaces. But notice the 500GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO drive, one of the most affordable SSDs you can buy from a big-name drive maker, isn't far behind.
AS-SSD Sequential Read and Write Speeds
This test uses the benchmark utility AS-SSD, which was designed specifically to test solid-state drives (as opposed to traditional hard drives). This setting within AS-SSD measures a drive's ability to read and write large files. Drive makers often quote these speeds, as a theoretical maximum, on the packaging or in advertising.
Sequential speeds are important if you're working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. Again, we secure-erase all SSDs using the utility Parted Magic before running this test.
In this test of large-file reads, the Samsung SSD 850 Pro again landed in second place, behind the Crucial M550 drive. But the difference between the two top drives here, about 2MB per second, is negligible, well within the margin of error.
Switching over to large-file writes, 2013's Samsung SSD 840 EVO actually did a smidge better here, but the SSD 850 Pro bested all other drives we've tested recently. The much more affordable Crucial MX100 drive, though, was only about 12MB per second slower on this test.
AS-SSD 4K Read and Write Speeds
This test, also a part of the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark, measures a drive's ability to traffic small files. Often overlooked, 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is quite important when you're talking about boot speed and program launch times.
When booting up your system or launching programs, many tiny files get accessed and edited frequently. The faster your drive can write and read these kinds of files (especially dynamic link library, or DLL, files in Windows), the faster your OS will "feel." Since these small files are accessed much more often than large media or game-level files, an SSD's showing on this test will have a greater impact on how fast it feels in ordinary use.
When reading small files, the Samsung SSD 850 Pro once again slightly trailed the last-generation SSD 840 EVO, as well as the Intel SSD 730 Series consumer drive. And once again, the Crucial MX100 wasn't far behind the pack of much pricier drives. In small-file writes, the Crucial MX100 interestingly came out on top, while the Samsung SSD 850 Pro landed in second place among drives we've tested recently.
Despite the fact that the SSD 850 Pro failed to outpace all other recent drives on any one of our charted benchmark tests, it's still the fastest drive we've tested overall. It landed in second or third place on all of the tests above, while most other drives tended to peak on certain tests and fall further behind in others.
It's also worth pointing out that on a few tests we run as a check on these numbers but that we don't usually formally chart or report (specifically, AS-SSD's Overall Score, as well as 4K reads and writes in Crystal DiskMark), the SSD 850 Pro did score slightly higher than all the other drives we've tested recently. Take a look, for example, at the results we saw on AS-SSD's Overall Score, which is a proprietary rating generated by the utility...
If it's consistently fast performance on all drive tasks you're after, this is the best drive we've seen—if not by a wide margin. That said, for some time now, the limitations of the SATA 3.0 interface have obviously been looming large, narrowing the performance gap between high-end drives and the best mainstream offerings. In response to that, we're starting to see some M.2-form-factor SSDs that can make use of the faster PCI Express lanes rather than straight-up SATA; we'll see if these blow past current SATA-drive limitations. (We have a couple on the test bench as we speak.)
Conclusion
With its 10-year warranty, consistently top-notch performance, and excellent software, the Samsung SSD 850 Pro is the best consumer SATA solid-state drive you can buy, if money is no object. But it's not necessarily the best choice for the average consumer.
If the outer extremes of SATA-based speed and drive longevity are of the utmost importance to you, the SSD 850 Pro should be at the top of your shopping list. It's an excellent option for content-creation professionals or enthusiasts who also like to splurge on high-end CPUs and graphics cards. But it's really not all that much faster than Samsung's SSD 840 EVO or Crucial's excellent budget drive, the MX100.
Granted, those drives have warranties of only three years, versus the SSD 850 Pro's decade of coverage. But you could very nearly buy two 512GB Crucial MX100 drives for the $400 price you'll currently pay for an SSD 850 Pro at the same capacity. With the prices of solid-state storage continuing to plummet, most users are better off opting for a less-expensive (and nearly as fast) SSD today and saving the extra money for what will likely be a much faster SATA Express or M.2 SSD at a much higher capacity a few years down the line.
Given the rate at which costs per gigabyte are falling on the SSD front, by 2017 you may be able to pick up a 3TB solid-state drive that's twice as fast as the SSD 850 Pro with the money you could save today by opting for a slightly slower drive. At that time, were you to buy the 850 Pro, you'd still have seven years on that SSD warranty. But before it's half over you may be itching to take advantage of the better deals on storage that will likely prevail then. So make sure you really need the speed now, because the role of fastest SSD is an ephemeral one, and these days, 10 years is practically forever when talking about advances in storage.
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