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The Samsung 850 Pro at 1 TB
It took a while but we finally got our hands on the Samsung 850 Pro SSD, not a small one either, it's that nicely sized 1 TB version. It is Samsung's first SSD with innovative 3D vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory, which ensures top performance and good endurance. The SSD drive brings 3D Vertical NAND Flash memory to SSDs, also known as Samsung 2nd Gen 86Gbit 40nm MLC V-NAND. Combined with Samsung's MEX controller and customized firmware the product is fast, very fast.
We've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though and one brand quite popular in Europe has now also introduced a line of SSDs. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such, SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir... I am a fan.
So I'm happy to report that we can finally put the Samsung 850 Pro drive to the test. Samsung’s new 850 SSD Pro product line is powered by the company’s new MEX controller. A 3-core controller based off the older MDX controller, this drive will be amongst the fastest we have ever tested. It’s not just about performance though, it is about endurance as well. In a nutshell, endurance is the number of program-erase cycles an SSD has before you can't write onto it anymore. Samsung claims you can write at least 150TB of data to the 850 Pro before it runs out of P/E cycles. This means most of us won't use up the drive's endurance in our lifetime at normal usage.
IOPS numbers are now reaching the 90,000 ~ 100,000 mark. Overall, for the 850 series performance has increased as well. Sequential reads for example performance wise are 550 MB/s for the 850 Pro. Write performance has jumped to 520 MB/sec. Samsung also gives the SSD a nice 10-year warranty and it has a RAPID cache mode that further boosts its performance.
Samsung 850 Pro SSD with MLC 3D V-NAND and the Samsung MEX controller
