Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review

Final Words

The 850 EVO is yet another showcase of Samsung's engineering talent and truth to be told there is a lot of good in the 850 EVO. By combining TLC with V-NAND technology, Samsung is eliminating any and all concerns that people might have had about the endurance of TLC NAND and to back that up Samsung is rating the 850 EVO's endurance higher than the MLC drives of most manufacturers. I never considered the endurance of TLC NAND to be an issue for average client workloads, but I saw many people who were doubtful about the sufficiency of 1,000 P/E cycles, so with twice that in TLC V-NAND I believe many will and should stop treating TLC as a second class citizen.

Not only is the endurance higher, but the 850 EVO's performance is also better compared to its predecessor. In our 2011 Storage Benches the 850 EVO matches up with the 850 Pro and is hence one of the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSDs for typical client workloads. In very heavy workloads, illustrated by our 2013 Storage Bench, the 850 EVO does okay, but it's clear that it's outperformed by drives that are more optimized for such usage.

There is one huge 'but' however – the price. The 850 EVO is a very competitive drive in performance and features, but neither of these warrants the premium Samsung is charging. As I've said before, there are only two main segments in the SSD market that I recognize, which are the value/mainstream and high-end/enthusiast segments.

For the value segment, the key consideration is the price because these are typically users who don't push their systems to the limits and thus shouldn't pay a premium for a performance increase that is likely to be negligible for their usage. Our Light Workload suite highlights this pretty well because the difference between most drives is on the order of 10-20% and while a possible 10% increase in performance would be worth $5, $10 and maybe even $20 to some users, it's definitely not worth the ~$50 Samsung is charging for the 850 EVO over Crucial's MX100 and SanDisk's Ultra II for example.

As for the high-end segment, Samsung already has that one covered by the 850 Pro. The 850 EVO, especially at the smaller capacities, isn't fast enough under IO intensive workloads to really compete with the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro. Given that the Extreme Pro can be had for about the same cost (depending on the capacity, of course), I would much rather have that if I was looking for a high-end SSD.

In other words, the 850 EVO falls into the infamous middle-class. It doesn't have an obvious niche in the market because it's too expensive for the value-oriented buyer and it's not fast enough to be considered as a competitive high-end SSD. If Samsung shaved $30 to $50 off the price, the 850 EVO would be competitive against the other value drives because the five-year warranty and Samsung's top-of-the-class software suite add some value, but with the current pricing there are just better options on the market.

A part of me sees that it might have been worthwhile for Samsung to do one more planar NAND shrink to be more competitive in the mainstream segment because right now the 850 EVO is missing that market. While 3D NAND will eventually become more cost efficient as the number of layers increases, we are not there yet. I absolutely love all the performance and endurance benefits V-NAND is bringing to the table, but if the 850 EVO can't even compete with MLC drives in price, that's a bit alarming.

There is still hope that the MSRPs are just conservative and street prices could end up lower. If they don't, while the 850 EVO is clearly the best performing "value" drive, it likely won't see the same sort of success as its predecessor. Samsung also has a strong presence in the OEM desktop and laptop markets, but OEMs may not see enough to sway them over from the 840 EVO if prices are quite a bit higher.