Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: 3D Vertical NAND Hits Desktop Storage

Results: Power Testing

Active Idle Power Consumption

Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.

Active idle power numbers are critical, especially when it comes to their impact on mobile platforms. Idle means different things on different systems, though. Pretty much every drive we're testing is capable of one or more low-power states, up to and including the DevSlp stuff we covered on the previous page.

Idle power consumption is stated as up to .4 W maximum by Samsung, but I see a steady .28 W each for the 128, 256, and 1024 GB 850 Pro. Rounding gives the 256 GB model an extra hundredth.

PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption

If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Maximum power may spike fiercely, but the draw during a PCMark 7 run is light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor" between peaks of varying intensity.

All three capacities peak between 2 and 3 W, and each drops down to .3 W in between jobs. Because each drive comes equipped with a different amount of flash, they don't line up exactly. But it's easy to see that the 850 Pro is easy on power, even during heavy use.

The maximum power consumption of Samsung's 1 TB 850 Pro is around 3 W. Exact figures for the other capacities are given. The transition is smooth, though. I believe that different die sizes are being used for the smaller drives. But without knowing more about V-NAND, only Samsung's tight-lipped engineers know for sure.

  • MoulaZX
    I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-
    Reply
  • cryan
    I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

    I don't know if this really changes anything for you. Two EVOs are still going to be better than one 850 Pro in every way. But I understand the sentiment!

    Christopher Ryan
    Reply
  • lp231
    13621005 said:
    I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-
    You just ordered a few hours ago. Just cancel your order if you really want this 850 Pro.
    Reply
  • tomfreak
    10yrs warranty, may be finally I have a reason to buy SSD. lol
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    13621197 said:
    10yrs warranty, may be finally I have a reason to buy SSD. lol

    I can guarantee that in 10 years you won't own that drive anymore. :lol:
    Reply
  • 10tacle
    I still have several 8-10 year old drives laying around between 80GB-150GB. I mostly use them as external drives for backing up USB thumb drives and other files that aren't large volume.
    Reply
  • helper800
    Hoping for some SATA 12gbs (or more) transfer speeds in the coming years.
    Reply
  • razor512
    Will overclocking the bus that the sata controller is on impact the performance?

    Can you test on an AMD platform which makes it easier to over clock that bus and some of the connected components?
    Reply
  • BestJinjo
    Looking forward to future generations of 3D Vertical Nand on M.2 / M.2 Ultra interface. Too bad SATA 3 is all maxed out and the next generation standards are not yet mainstream for the masses which is holding back SSD performance. As far as this drive goes, it's only slightly faster than MX100 but costs double. I don't think it's worth it. MX100 512GB sounds like a perfect stop-gap until M.2/SATAe drives arrive with 1-1.5TB/sec throughput. Perhaps Samsung will give us 95% of the performance for a fraction of the price in the 850 EVO.
    Reply
  • MoulaZX
    I 'just' ordered 2x Samsung EVO 120GB a few hours ago, then I stumbled onto this article. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Every freaking time I run into this, be it Storage, CPU, or GPU.... -_-

    I don't know if this really changes anything for you. Two EVOs are still going to be better than one 850 Pro in every way. But I understand the sentiment!

    Christopher Ryan

    Not quite. One is for my Desktop, the other is for my Father's Desktop.

    For my Desktop, I'll be stepping up from 2x OCZ Vertex 2 60GB in RAID 0. Hope it'll be worth it...
    Reply