We spotted a 4 TB Samsung 850 Evo for sale at adorama.com, and although Adorama may not be a household name, the company is one of the world's largest photography, video and imaging retailers. For now, it is also the sole holder of the unannounced Samsung 4 TB Evo. The discovery spurred a round of additional sleuthing that yielded a revised 850 Evo data sheet (May 2016) on Samsung's site. The datasheet lists the new 4 TB SSD, which confirms the new capacious SSD is legitimate and headed to a store near you.
Adorama lists the 4 TB Evo as utilizing 3D TLC (3 bit) V-NAND and boasting a top speed of 98,000/90,000 4K random read/write IOPS and up to 540/520 MBps of sequential read/write throughput. The performance specs are hardly groundbreaking and really just serve to illustrate how much the SATA 6 Gbps connection is limiting the current crop of SATA SSDs. Samsung also noted that it's optimized for client use, and listed the QD1 performance at 10,000/40,000 4k random read/write IOPS. This is a useful specification because the low queue depths is where the majority of consumer workloads reside.
The 4 TB of capacity is the big story, of course, and Samsung managed to cram the spacious digs into the standard 2.5" form factor with a 7mm Z-height (thickness). Adorama lists the 4 TB 850 Evo at $1,499, which works out to roughly $0.36-per-GB. Although that price is more than a mere pittance, you get AES-256, TCG/Opal 2.0 and IEEE 1667 encryption support, which makes this SSD particularly attractive for professional users with fat wallets. The SSD also supports Samsung's Magician software, which provides plenty of secondary benefits such as RAM caching, firmware updates and monitoring.
The new 4 TB Evo sports a 300 TBW endurance rating (0.55 Drive Writes Per Day), which is the same amount of TBW endurance found in the 2 TB model. SSDs with more capacity usually have higher endurance limits, so the unchanged endurance is surprising and may indicate a lower amount of overprovisioning. Samsung includes a five-year warranty, but as with other SSDs, the warranty expires when you surpass the endurance threshold.
Power consumption for larger SSDs is typically higher due to the additional components, but the 4 TB Evo seems to have that under control with a maximum of 3.1W/3.6W read/write. The drive also features a 70mW idle and 10mW Device Sleep rating, which is important for mobile use cases. The 4 TB model employs the MHX controller, which is similar to the 2 TB model. Samsung also doubled the 4 TB Evo's LPDDR3 DRAM allocation up to 4 GB.
We attempted to purchase the 4 TB 850 Evo, but Adorama informed us that it is on backorder, so we have no word on availability. However, the listing, price and detailed specifications indicate that release is imminent and when they are released it'll be worth checking to see if you can find an Adorama coupon to bring the price down.
