Samsung SSD 850 EVO (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 8, 2014 10:00 AM ESTInside The Drives
There are three different PCB designs in the 850 EVO lineup. The 120GB and 250GB models (above) use a tiny PCB with room for two NAND packages (one on each side). Interestingly enough, both use octal-die packages, meaning that the 120GB 850 EVO only has a single 128GB (8*16GB) NAND package. Decoding the part number reveals that the packages are equipped with eight chip enablers (CEs), so a single NAND package is viable since all eight dies can be accessed simultaneously.
The use of octal-die packages is actually true for all capacities. It's an interesting choice nevertheless, but I suspect Samsung's packaging technology is advanced and mature enough that it's more cost efficient to use high die count packages and small PCBs instead of larger PCBs with more and less dense NAND packages.
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO NAND Configurations | ||||
| Capacity | 120GB | 250GB | 500GB | 1TB |
| # of NAND Packages | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| # of Die Per Package | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Total # of Die | 8 | 16 | 32 | 64 |
| Die Capacity | 128Gbit | 128Gbit | 128Gbit | 128Gbit |
| Raw NAND Capacity | 128GiB | 256GiB | 512GiB | 1024GiB |
| Over-Provisioning | 12.7% | 9.1% | 9.1% | 9.1% |
TurboWrite
TurboWrite is a feature that Samsung brought to the 840 EVO to increase write performance. The idea of running a small portion of the NAND in SLC mode was nothing new, but it was the first time it truly made sense because the 840 EVO used slower TLC NAND and hence the SLC buffer could provide significant improvements to write performance and user experience. Unsurprisingly, TurboWrite is also present in the 850 EVO.
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO TurboWrite SLC Buffer Size | ||||
| Capacity | 120GB | 250GB | 500GB | 1TB |
| TurboWrite Buffer Size | 3GB | 3GB | 6GB | 12GB |
The buffer sizes and core architecture have remained unchanged. All writes hit the SLC buffer first, from which they then get moved to the TLC array during idle time. The only exception is a case of long, sustained period of writes that exceeds the buffer size, in which case the data will be written straight to the TLC portion.
| Write Performance With and Without TurboWrite | ||||
| With TurboWrite | Without TurboWrite | |||
| Sequential Write | 4KB Random Write (QD32) | Sequential Write | 4KB Random Write (QD32) | |
| 120GB | 520MB/s | 88K IOPS | 150MB/s | 38K IOPS |
| 250GB | 520MB/s | 88K IOPS | 300MB/s | 70K IOPS |
| 500GB | 520MB/s | 90K IOPS | 500MB/s | 80K IOPS |
| 1TB | 520MB/s | 90K IOPS | 520MB/s | 80K IOPS |
Samsung's reviewer's guide states that the 850 EVO features "enhanced TurboWrite technology" with a focus on random write performance, but I don't have any additional details as to how the TurboWrite implementation in the 850 EVO differs from the 840 EVO. TurboWrite was always designed to cache all writes regardless of the nature of the write (random vs sequential), so I'm not sure if anything has actually changed. Obviously the algorithms have been optimized for the new NAND and controller architecture and it's possible that the whole batch of algorithms has improved in the process, but I'll provide an update when I hear back from Samsung.
I ran a quick sequential write test to see how TurboWrite behaves in the 850 EVO. At smaller capacities it clearly provides a tremendous performance boost, but at 500GB and 1TB there is enough NAND to provide the parallelism that is needed to max out the SATA 6Gbps interface. That is a big improvement over the 840 EVO as its write performance maxed out at ~400MB/s when writing to the TLC array, so the performance benefits of 3D NAND technology are already evident.
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TheWrongChristian - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Performance consistency wise, the MEX controller on the 1TB drive looks better than the MGX controller on the smaller drives. I guess this is the loss of a cpu core at work, but I figure there'll be no discernible difference to the user experience.All in all, looks like a nice drive, a reasonable upgrade to the existing 840 evo drives. Just hope the V-NAND cost brings the whole price down to compelling levels as the process matures.
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
As for the Wear Leveling Count, it might actually be taking into account that a fixed portion of the installed NAND is used in SLC mode for the TurboWrite buffer. The 120GB model has 128GiB of NAND, of which 9 GiB are used for 3 GiB TurboWrite Buffer, so that makes 119 GiB of TLC capacity for both overprovisioning and user addressable space.By the way, this also implies that because of TurboWrite these Samsung EVO SSDs (including the previous 840 EVO) have less overprovisioning space than most other SSDs.
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Yikes! This was not meant to be in response to TheWrongChristian.hojnikb - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
>What I do know is that Samsung started the mass production of TLC V-NAND later, which suggests that the two aren't completely uniform. Moreover, from what I know TLC NAND requires some changes to the peripheral circuitry in order to read three bits from one cell, so while the NAND memory arrays could be alike the die size is still likely at least slightly different.Is it possible, that samsung designed 2nd gen 3D with TLC in mind (eg requred peripheral circuitry) and simply set the controller in 850PRO to use 4 states instead of 8 (so MLC). I mean, it kinda makes sense to go this way, but not the other way around....
Solid State Brain - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
@Kristian VättöDo you have any information from Samsung about whether the TurboWrite SLC buffer also helps decreasing the write amplification like on the SanDisk Ultra II with nCache 2.0?
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Unfortunately I don't. It was among the questions I sent but unfortunately Samsung couldn't get any of my questions answered on time for the review.Solid State Brain - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Too bad that you couldn't get an answer in time. According to my observations from other people's drives, it really looks like the Turbowrite does help on that regard. Try checking out my thread on the Memory and Storage forum.This phenomenon (write amplification just over or below 1.0x) is likely not going to show up during reviews or heavy usage since generally the drives get secure erased often and/or get hammered with writes which end up filling the Turbowrite SLC buffer.
Daniel Egger - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It would be nice to have some older drives in the charts to get some perspective on whether a drive would make a good upgrade choice. For an upgrade the available space and the space/price ratio are probably the most important aspects but some features or a major speed increase might sweeten the deal even more. ;)sheh - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Not perfect of always complete, but usable:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
Kvaern - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
It's my anecdotal experience that all these awesome benchmark figures means absolutely nothing for the average user.Case in point I upgraded from an old 60GB corsair drive to an EVO840 which on paper is like twice as fast as the Corsair but in reality my user experience is exactly the same.