Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The Samsung 850 PRO 1TB drive is the largest capacity 2.5″ pure SSD (i.e. not a hybrid) we’ve tested to date. With 1,024GB (1GB byte = 1,000,000,000 bytes) on board, after spare area needs and Windows consumes its bit, we are left with a hefty 953GiB (1Gib = 1,073,741,824 bytes) available for use. Finally we are getting to the point of having 1TB SSDs available that don’t have an astronomical price tag.
Samsung has made some nice improvements over the 840 PRO drives, helped along with modified firmware and their proprietary high density 32-layer 3D V-NAND. Performance is pretty even across all capacities with the 128GB drive just a little slower than the 256GB, 512 and 1TB drives at 470MB/s whereas the others are rated for 520MB/s. Reads across all are rated as 550MB/s max and that’s what we saw on our benchmarks. On our new consistency test, it showed that performance is still strong even after the drive has taken a beating and recovers nicely. Adding to that, the Magician software allows the enabling of RAPID mode to boost performance even further.
This review comes on the heels of our last review of Crucial’s MX100 who’s performance was found to be solid and carries some pretty incredibly low pricing. Certainly, that makes it tougher for other makers to make their product more attractive short of matching or beating their pricing. Samsung hasn’t done as their drives are priced for enthusiast drive segment with MSRPs of $129.99, $229.99, $429.99 and $729.99 for the 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB drives respectively. For the 1TB drive, that comes out to around $1.40 per usable GB. This definitely doesn’t fall into the budget category but given that the main demographic is for high-end PCs and workstations, it’s priced commensurately with its peers. Plus, you can’t discount the value of, until now, unheard of warranty of 10 full years which is the major distinction between this and the 840 EVO which yielded similar performance in our benchmarks.
As usual, Samsung has impressed us with their latest drive and continue to be one of the few makers that can and are continuing to innovate instead of being satisfied with the status quo of rolling out incremental updates with the same parts. For the 850 PRO, both performance and endurance have increased while power consumption continues to fall. This makes it hard for us to highlight any faults but if we’d had to pick one area for improvement, we’d like to see Samsung and other manufacturers start to really focus on 4K performance as it’s the biggest weak spot in most drives.
Legit Bottom Line: The Samsung 850 PRO is a worthy successor to the 840 PRO with an exceptional warranty and world class performance.