Samsung 850 Pro 512GB

Souped-up “Pro” components may sound promising, but performance is no better than cheaper alternatives

It might seem that SATA SSDs are much of a muchness, but Samsung has evidently sought to give its high-end 2.5in drive a character of its own. The 850 Pro uses the company’s upmarket MEX controller, rather than the 850 Evo’s MGX, and the slightly different capacity – 512GB rather than 500GB – bespeaks a different arrangement of flash memory.

These technical variations, however, make little difference to performance. With crushing predictability, any clever technical advantage the internals might offer is obliterated by the limitations of the SATA interface. We can say with confidence that you will not notice any difference in performance between this drive and the Crucial MX300.

That’s a bit embarrassing, in light of the 850 Pro’s weighty price tag – on a per-gigabyte basis, it’s this month’s most expensive SATA drive. Still, the money does at least pay for some quality engineering. The drive’s rated for 300TBW, making it one of the hardest-wearing drives on test this month, and it comes with a ten-year warranty that’s matched only by the SanDisk Extreme Pro.

You also get the usual Samsung benefits of hardware encryption and wizard-driven disk cloning software – but then the Evo includes those too, and it’s £74 cheaper. In the absence of a performance boost, therefore, it’s hard to justify the extra cost of the 850 Pro.