Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
The ultimate all-arounder?
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED that Samsung SSDs kick ass. Right? Samsung has certainly been the dominant figure in the consumer SSD market for the last few years, but things haven’t all gone Samsung’s way.
The 840 EVO drive, just as a for instance, suffered from some fairly serious bork. Samsung has been forced to release multiple firmware patches for the 840 EVO to address a performance issue that involves access speeds to old data falling off over time. In that context, it’s arguably the job of the latest 850 model to rebuild the reputation of Samsung’s mainstream “EVO” models.
On paper, the 850 EVO certainly looks like a technical tour de force. For starters, there’s snazzy 3D VNAND, which sees layers of memory stacked vertically. It’s the same approach as seen in the pricier 850 Pro, though the EVO model has triple-level memory cells, where the Pro sports faster and more robust dual-level cells. The Pro also touts a 10-year warranty to the EVO’s five-year cover.
On the other hand, the EVO boasts the newer controller hardware, in the form of the Samsung MGX chip. Anyway, the real contest for the EVO isn’t its Samsung sibling, but SATA drives, such as Kingston’s HyperX Savage.
For the most part, it’s too close to call. But the EVO does separate itself a little from the pack when it comes to 4K random access performance. In CrystalMark, it’s the fastest SATA drive for 4K reads and writes bar none, and the second-fastest of any drive for 4K reads. That includes all the fancy PCI Express drives. Yes, even the NVMe-enabled drives. That is a super-impressive result for a mid-range SATA drive.
It’s a little less spectacular in our real-world file copy test, logging 2 minutes and 32 seconds. But that’s only a few clicks behind the Kingston HyperX Savage, and it’s not enough to spoil a great overall performance. Combined with Samsung’s excellent drive management software and that five-year warranty, where some of the others only deliver three years, it’s one hell of a package.
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
BABE RUTH Solid all-around performance; five-year warranty.
MISSPENT YOUTH It’s still just a SATA drive; doesn’t do anything spectacular.
$150, www.samsung.com