The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend
by Billy Tallis on January 23, 2018 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with The Destroyer, Samsung's SATA SSDs were still on top before the Samsung 860 PRO arrived. The 860 PRO brings only modest improvements to the average data rates on the Heavy test, and the 512GB models is slightly faster than the 4TB model. The only real outlier here is the Crucial MX300, for its poor performance when the drive is full.
The Samsung MLC SSDs and the SanDisk Ultra 3D offer the best average and 99th percentile scores among the SATA drives, but even the current models from Intel and Crucial are close enough to be indistinguishable without benchmarking tools.
Most of the drives show small differences in average read latency between the full and empty drive test runs, but it's the write latencies that account for the bulk of the delays experienced during this test. The Samsung 860 PROs are among the several drives that show virtually no difference in average write latency when the drive is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores show that most of these SATA SSDs are equally competent at keeping latency under control. As usual, the Crucial MX300's full drive results stand out as particularly bad, and the BX300 is revealed to have a problem with high latency writes whether or not it is full.
The 860 PRO mostly eliminates the gap in power efficiency relative to the modern competitors. The 4TB model requires slightly more power than the 512GB, but is still a substantial improvement over the multi-TB 850s.
64 Comments
View All Comments
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Or. We could finally transition to Sata 3.3 which offers 1,900MB/s.PixyMisa - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
SATA Express is dead. U.2 is twice as fast and better supported.I'd like to see internal drives move to USB-C. Better connector, faster, universally supported, and any internal drive just works as an external drive.
Would need USB RAID controllers though.
peevee - Tuesday, January 30, 2018 - link
You mean 3.2, SATA Express, with 2 PCI Express lines? Seems like it is the past, U.2 superseding it.Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
SATA Express has been a non-starter and DOA.This is why people use M.2, U.2 and other non-SATA PCIe interfaces.
Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
M.2 NVMe I should be more specific.Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
PCIe 3.0 x4 beats PCIe 3.0 x2 from SATA 3.2Gastec - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
I have an 8 year old PC that was designed from the start without an internal DVD drive as I had no need for one, having used an external USB DVD unit since like 2009. I have not plugged in the external DVD for more than a year, maybe two years. The PC sports 2 SSDs (one for the OS and the other for games) and only one old and annoying HDD that I seriously consider replacing with a SSD to have a more relaxed, vibration-free computing experience. I this day and age a computer enthusiast is more stressed than ever and values a quiet, vibration-free system. So the HDD must go!appliance5000 - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
What are DVDs?chrcoluk - Friday, April 12, 2019 - link
unless ssd's can match spindles price per gig, then yes sata will most definitely still be around in 5 years as its what powers spindle drives. Also good luck in finding boards that support 8 nvme devices.generaldwarf - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
And the mx500 is the new king of TLC, less expensive than the evo for the same thing.