Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SATA SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Samsung EVO series has been the go to SSD for price versus performance aficionados for many years now and it looks like that won’t be changing anytime soon. We topped the drives rated 550 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write speeds and came close enough to the drives 98k/90k 4K Random IOPS read/write performance target. Samsung wasn’t able to boost the raw performance of this series due to being limited by the SATA III interface, but they were able to make a handful of key changes that improves the user experience. Most consumers will never know that the Samsung 860 EVO series uses the new Samsung MJX controller paired with Samsung’s latest V-NAND 3bit MLC, but they will likely notice the longer battery life if they are on a mobile device and much improved sustained write performance. They can also sleep easier at night knowing that the reliability of this drive is superior to most all drives in this class. A 150 TBW endurance rating for ever 250GB of storage capacity for a value drive is impressive.

Samsung SSD 860 EVO Series Retail Packaging

The included Samsung cloning software makes switching from your old hard drive or SSD to the Samsung 860 EVO simple. If you want a good value, easy installation, solid performance and a reliable drive the Samsung EVO series is hard to pass up. You’ll pay a slight premium for Samsung name, but as with so many things in life you get what you pay for. When it comes to pricing the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB model that we looked at today is $150 ($0.30 per GB) as a 2.5-inch drive or $170 ($0.34 per GB) online. If you have a newer drive that has an open M.2 slot, that might be a better option as you can tidy up a desktop case by not having a SATA power and data cable to route. Some of the 2.5-inch 860 EVO models are less than their M.2 counterpart and that is likely due to the fact they are selling better and the retailers are likely buying more at a time.

Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2.5″ SATA III Series Pricing

Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 SATA III Series Pricing

We should also point out that this drive is aimed at regular desktop users and is not meant to run in workstations or servers that handle large database management systems like Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL. There are other classes of drives that better handle those workloads.

When it comes to reliability, the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB model that we looked at today has a 300TBW rating, so over a course of 5-years (1,825 days) you could write just over 164 GB of data to the drive per day!

If you are looking for a SATA III consumer drive and wanted the best TLC drive out there the Samsung 860 EVO is it. It will be interesting to see how long the Samsung 860 EVO is going to be around for considering the Samsung 850 EVO made it four years. The SATA III interface isn’t going anywhere, but what can any company do to make better drives? It would have been nice to see some idle power improvements between the 850 EVO and 860 EVO, but it remained the same (50mW). Improvements beyond this will be tough, so the 860 EVO series will likely be around for a very long time. It’s a good thing Samsung offers a wide selection of capacities ranging from 250GB to 4TB.

LR Editors' Choice

Legit Bottom Line: Samsung 860 EVO had big shoes to fill with replacing the 850 EVO series, but they managed to bring enough changes to the table for a new series that will likely be around for years since the SATA III interface is limiting further innovations.