Samsung 850 EVO And 850 Pro 2TB SSD Review

Samsung is updating its SATA SSD product line by adding new 2TB options to the 850 Pro and 850 Evo families. Are they any better than the existing models?

By Chris Ramseyer
published

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Final Thoughts

Even without any performance improvements, Samsung gets recognition for introducing the first viable 2TB SSDs. Not everyone needs a drive with this much capacity, and the price tags will sort out the true believers from the tire-kickers. Desktop enthusiasts always have the option to add 4TB+ hard drives to their machines. But mobile users are more space-constrained; they don't have that flexibility. Cloud storage was supposed to be the mobile storage savior; however, it seems like the only ones excited about that are ISP executives.

In my experience, there is no doubt about the need for the products Samsung is introducing. As I type, I'm also trying to move several hundred gigabytes of data from my notebook to keep its free space indicator out of the red. This is a common problem that is slowly being eliminated by larger, lower-priced flash-based devices. Samsung's new 2TB options will further reduce the time between notebook data flushes to NAS or other backup appliances.

We spent a lot of time exploring the 850 Pro 2TB performance abnormality we found, but not enough to isolate the problem. This is a bad time for Samsung to have firmware issues. Some users are still reporting slow-downs on the 840 EVO, even after the company attempted multiple fixes. The 840 EVO is the best-selling client SSD of all time. But the transition to three-bit-per-cell flash may have come too soon or without powerful-enough ECC to tame it.

The new 850 EVO 2TB, on the other hand, could be one of the best client SSDs ever released. The smaller EVO models managed to keep TLC performance at MLC levels. However, the largest capacity point moves the 850 EVO into SanDisk Extreme Pro territory. It's now a part of the top performance tier thanks to even larger TurboWrite emulated SLC memory that can even keep large transfers in single-bit-per-cell latency levels.

The largest drawback to both new Samsung 2TB SSDs is their price. Without competition, Samsung can ask almost as much as it wants. The 850 Pro 2TB runs $999. The 850 EVO 2TB is almost a value in comparison at $799. The comments section is going to dislike this, but once you look at the EVO 2TB for all it offers, that value story comes into greater focus. Samsung could have placed a premium on the 850 EVO 2TB, but the MSRP is in line with current pricing, twice what you'd pay for the 1TB EVO.

Samsung 850 Pro 2TB

Samsung 850 EVO 2TB


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Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

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Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Jeffs0418
    Great article. It seems the new EVO's might go down in history as a tough act to follow.
    I purchased a 250GB model several months ago and love it.
    Reply
  • soldier44
    Just picked up the 512gb version and love it. Will get another one soon for raid 0. A grand for the 2Tb wow but get what you pay for.
    Reply
  • eklipz330
    another 2 years before this falls within normal prices?
    Reply
  • Jeffs0418
    These are perfectly reasonable per gig prices. If you mean significantly lower prices it certainly wont be 2 years!
    Wait just a few short months as more 2TB consumer SSD's hit the market and watch them tumble.
    Reply
  • mr grim
    Just about to get my first SSD, been waiting forever for the tech to mature a bit and for the price to become more reasonable, my first ever SDD I have ordered is the 1TB 850 Evo that I picked up on Ebay for $450 AU, just hope the saving is worth the risk, if I purchased one locally I would be looking at around the $600 price range, these new 2TB drive would likely cost well over the $1000 mark.
    Reply
  • uglyduckling81
    Even the first Gen SSD's were mature enough to use. My first SSD was the OCZ Agility. AU$510 for 128Gb in 2010 I think. What a game changer.
    I only stopped using it when the laptop I had put it in got stolen last year.
    The worst part of SSD's has been using someone else's PC without one. It's disgusting doing support on an OS that isn't installed on an SSD.
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Firstly, Tom's, I'm begging you guys, please stop with the compact charts that require clicks to see them and especially, ESPECIALLY the lazy-loading of the charts. It really breaks my focus on the article when I'm scrolling through, reading text and then all of a sudden the text shifts down and I lose my place because some graphs above it just loaded.

    Now that my request to you is out the way, thank you for the article. The 2TB EVO really looks amazing!! I'm not a Samsung fan, but they definitely have my round of applause for this drive, especially because of the SLC emulation.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    "In this section, you'll find the 850 Pro on the right side and the 850 Evo on the left. ..."

    Except for the two images immediately above that line. :D

    SanDisk stated a while ago they wanted to ramp up to 8TB SSDs as quickly as possible, but I'll believe that when I see it. Unlikely they'd chuck out a 4TB now if they can make money from a 2TB first (really wish just once some company would properly leave the others behind instead of milking every inbetween stage of a tech as much as possible).
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    (Chris, trying to reach the UK site atm to edit comments results in a page redirection error)

    "The only drives faster than Samsung's 850 Pro and Evo 2TB in sequential writes are the 850 Pro and Evo 1TB."

    Why have you used a bar graph with a non-zero origin for the results? I really hate that, it's very visually misleading. Please replace the image with a graph that has the origin at zero so it will at least be visually logical. The whole point of a bar graph is that the visual impact can allow one to infer an immediate sense of difference, something which is destroyed by using a non-zero origin.

    In contrast to this, why do all the PCMark8 tests have zero origins, which have almost no results variation at all? Actually I don't know why anyone bothers with that suite, it tells one nothing useful IMO, I mean does anyone really care about Service Times for games? Level loading and to what extent SSDs can reduce in-game stuttering, sure, but then this is achieved with just about any SSD.

    Anyway, please replace the non-zero-origin graph for the Seq. Write data.

    Ian.

    PS. Why does the Vector 180 show such an odd performance wobble as it moves up the queue depths for the seq. write test?

    Reply
  • zodiacfml
    Actually, it was boring. Many SSDs already saturated the SATA interface, including the AHCI protocol. Yet, one would still get a Samsung SSD because of its V-NAND tech for longer NAND life.

    Reply