Samsung 850 PRO SSD 256GB Review
Despite being introduced a couple of years ago now, Samsung’s 840 PRO continues to find itself at the top of performance tree, with other manufacturers playing catch up. Samsung has now launched the 850 PRO, the replacement for the SSD 840 PRO.
The 850 PRO uses of a new type of NAND. Typically, the focus of lowering the cost of NAND and therefore SSDs has been scaling down through process and die shrinks. This process carries with it issues to do with performance and endurance that manufacturers have had to deal with in their own ways.
Samsung’s answer to this is its new NAND, specifically 32 layer 3D V-NAND, which it claims is set to break through the density (and hence capacity) barriers that we’re starting to reach with current 2D/planar NAND.
The 850 PRO is class-leading in virtually every single benchmark, and the target audience of this drive will be particularly pleased with its improvements in write consistency, which is the main area where it could be said the SSD 840 PRO was lacking.
Benchmarks for the 256 are Read 550MB/s, Write 520MB/s, 100k/90k IOPS Max.
It’s not just performance that’s improved, as endurance and power consumption have also improved. The ten year warranty is awesome, as is the 150TB TBW limit that accompanies it, especially for the 128GB version. It’s much higher than what any other consumer SSD currently has, though it should be noted that the NAND will likely outlive 150TB TBW many times over
It’s easily the best 2.5-inch SATA SSD available today, Samsung has delivered once again here and we are expecting our first deliveries at Simple towers imminently.