SSD prices are suffering in the wake of the global pandemic and a general NAND price increase, but things seem to be settling down a bit as crowd-favorite SSD manufacturer Samsung seems to be lowering the price for its Samsung 860 EVO 2.5” 1TB SATA III Internal SSD to $139.99. The price is popping up at outlets like Newegg (opens in new tab), Amazon (opens in new tab) and Best Buy (opens in new tab).
The 260GB version of this SSDs is currently one of our picks for Best SSDs, though this deal definitely makes the 1TB iteration, which our Samsung 860 EVO review knocked for being too expensive, more approachable. As its name implies, this SSD connects over SATA III, is 2.5 inches long and holds 1TB of storage. It uses 3-bit per cell flash, though it reserves 2.3% of its V-NAND capacity for caching and background activities.
Samsung’s 860 EVO's drives dominated almost every benchmark we put it through in our 2019 review. That includes sequential read and write performance, random read and write performance, application storage bandwidth and a slew of other tests, where it consistently beat competitors like the Corsair NeutronXTi and Toshiba VX500.
While the 860 Evo did sell for closer to $110 (opens in new tab) in January of this year, this price drop shows signs of recovery for the SSD market.