Samsung's 850 EVO 1TB SSD appears live ... in 3D

Enterprise tech for the rest of us

Performance

Samsung gives official Sequential Read/Write figures for the whole 850 EVO range of up to 540MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. My 1TB drive managed 559MB/s Reads and 538MB/s Writes when tested with the ATTO benchmark. When it comes to writing the itty bitty files of normal desktop use, the 850 EVO is a tad faster than its predecessor in the CrystalDiskMark 4K test but still lags behind Crucial’s M550.

AS SSD (left) and ATTO benchmarks – click for a larger image

As with the 840 EVO, Samsung has used its TurboWrite technology - where a portion of the NAND is used as SLC - to boost the slower performing TLC NAND when it comes to random write performance.

The drive also uses the latest 2.1 version of Samsung’s Rapid RAM caching technology to do amazing things with the performance in benchmarks, as can be seen by comparing the two sets of CrystalDiskMark results. This latest version sees the maximum amount of system memory able to be accessed by the drive to rise from 1GB up to 4GB, if the system has 16GB and above.

CrystalDiskMark results for default and compressible data with Rapid mode score on the right

Also, the TLC version of V-NAND in the 850 EVO shows a much more consistent level of recovery in FutureMark’s PCMark 8 Consistency Test (Photoshop Heavy) than the standard TLC NAND of the 840 EVO. Indeed, it is much more on a par with the 2D Planer MLC NAND in the Crucial M550. Oh, and for those that are security minded, the drive has AES 256-bit full disk encryption, TCG/Opal v2.0 and IEEE1667 support.

The El Reg Verdict

The EVO version of the 850 with its TLC version of Samsung’s V-NAND technology may not have the amazing 10-year guarantee of the 850 PRO but its mix of five-year warranty, good performance and impressive endurance make it more than a worthy successor to the 840 EVO.

It would be even better if the price dropped a few quid. ®