Samsung 850 Pro

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Twinkieman

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Sep 17, 2014
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I have been looking into getting a Samsung 850 Pro and have been researching the product. Does anyone have an experience with the 850 Pro yet and what has been your view on it? I already own and use a Seagate SSD so this would just be another drive for me. Would you recommend it?
 
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kira70591
I would highly recommend the 850 Pro. I am currently running an 850 Pro 256GB. If you have a motherboard that supports SATA3 then you can expect to see around 550 MB read and 520 MB write (sequential). My 850 gets around 562 read and 533 write. The drive performs fantastic, the software that comes with the 850 (magician and migrate) is awesome as well. It worked flawlessly to migrate my HDD to my SSD and Magician allows you to see all of your SSD stats at a glance and it can also walk you through optimizing your Windows settings for a SSD. The 10 year warranty also does not hurt a bit. The drive may be obsolete in 10 years but at least it is there if you have ot use it. The 3d NAND architecture that is used in the drive should also help...
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kira70591

kira70591

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I would highly recommend the 850 Pro. I am currently running an 850 Pro 256GB. If you have a motherboard that supports SATA3 then you can expect to see around 550 MB read and 520 MB write (sequential). My 850 gets around 562 read and 533 write. The drive performs fantastic, the software that comes with the 850 (magician and migrate) is awesome as well. It worked flawlessly to migrate my HDD to my SSD and Magician allows you to see all of your SSD stats at a glance and it can also walk you through optimizing your Windows settings for a SSD. The 10 year warranty also does not hurt a bit. The drive may be obsolete in 10 years but at least it is there if you have ot use it. The 3d NAND architecture that is used in the drive should also help with endurance and longevity of the drive (according to Samsung); however, only time will tell. Overall, I would definitely recommend it as a great buy for a good price too. Newegg has deals from time to time on it so I would wait to pick it up when it goes on sale.

I would also make the 850 Pro your boot up drive as it probably has a higher performance than your Seagate. As I said, the migration tools are nice with the 850.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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I'm sure it will be a fine drive, but there are much cheaper SSD's that would perform about the same in the REAL WORLD.

I've extensively tested many SSD's and found most people could barely tell a SATA1 from a SATA3 drive (a 4x performance difference).

I like Samsung because of:
a) quality, and
b) great software (Samsung Magician) which can update the firmware, apply overprovisioning, benchmark, set profile

However, I'd get the 840 EVO instead for the price.
 
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Jake Lloyd

Jake Lloyd

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Feb 27, 2014
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Like Photonboy said, it's a great drive, but not really needed for everyday use. I was also looking at one last week but decided to pick up a 500gig 840 EVO for $230. I replaced my Samsung 830 256gig and it was seamless (and faster). Put the 830 in my new laptop as well so it was a really good deal.

The 840 is going to be just as fast in the real world and you can go bigger for less.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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About endurance:

As most people know, SSD's will wear out after a while. What most people don't seem to understand is that for the average user even the cheaper modern TLC NAND that the 840 EVO uses will take so long to wear out it's a non-issue.

Depending on how you calculate it for a Windows drive with real-world usage, we see numbers like 20+ years.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/samsung-ssd-840-evo-review-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3

Other:
I forgot to mention the "RAPID MODE" which uses your main System RAM as a fast buffer. It's difficult to determine how much affect this has on performance but I recommend turning it on.

The BENCHMARK will show a huge performance but this is not correct for real-world usage since it's not designed properly to test RAPID MODE.

Originally Samsung stated it used something like 512MB of System RAM I think but it appears that they avoided RESERVING any at all which make a lot of sense so basically the data goes into the System RAM very quickly (for an SSD write) then in turn is written to the SSD and removed from the System RAM.

My point is there appears to be no reason to NOT turn this feature on. I doubt write volatility due to power loss is much of an issue since this buffer process probably only adds a few milliseconds to the process.

My recommendations then:
1) Get a 120GB or 250GB Samsung 840 EVO (120GB should be enough for most users for just Windows and applications)

2) Install Samsung Magician and:
a) update SSD firmware
b) ensure no obvious issues like AHCI mode not on
c) overprovision
d) assign a PROFILE (OS optimization)
e) benchmark (first without Rapid Mode. Should get in the 500's for read/write assuming a good SATA controller)
f) enable RAPID MODE and reboot

*The OS optimization page is really handy. You can set a basic profile such as "maximum performance" which I did, then modify some of the things that normally you'd have to access from Windows.

I forget if Hibernation was disabled by performance mode or not but I turned it on manually so I ended up with a Customized option.
 
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