Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]Conclusion

So the successor to one of the most sought after and popular SSDs of 2014 is upon us; the 850 EVO of course which replaces the 840 EVO which is now end of the line or will be soon!  I think the main question on everyone’s mind however is how does it stack up to the 850 PRO which is essentially a higher spec version but also how does it fare against the drive it replaces (840 EVO)?  Well the results are in, the benchmarks have been run and we have had a look at what Samsung have to offer so let’s crack on with my final thoughts…

Performance wise, the sequential read and write speeds between the 840 and 850 EVO aren’t too dissimilar and trade blows across the majority of the benchmarks; the 850 PRO still strikes both out marginally and the SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB in my opinion further beats all of them; I would have expected the 850 EVO to do a little better than it has given the technology it’s utilising.  In the PCMark 7 storage tests, in both occasions it falls to the bottom of the graphs consistently with the 840 being above the newer model.

In real world testing, the 850 EVO did however show its weight in gold as it easily beat the older 840 EVO and was the closest SSD to the fantastic SanDisk Extreme PRO drive (at time of testing).  This is exactly where you would want to put your money and the real bread and butter of any SSD is how it handles itself in real world performance such as seek times and file transfer.

Touching more on the design, the Samsung 850 EVO follows the exact same design scheme as previous iterations of the 840/850 series; a solid colour with a tab, in this case black and grey respectively.  This is a nice contrast and the addition of metal casing gives that extra feeling of quality, without necessarily adding any extra weight; a maximum of 66g on the 1TB version.  Overall the design is good and I really do like the contrast and as I mentioned earlier, it’s nice to see Samsung have gone with a slightly off-colour black sticker on the back instead of those typical “white labels”.

Coming in at around £109.99, it is far from the cheapest 250/256GB SSD on the market; the Crucial MX100 in fact smashes this at around £30-40 cheaper at some e-tailers.  With the EVO focused on performance for the price, it’s hard to understand why the 850 EVO is quite a bit more expensive than the original 840 EVO currently sits at?  Ok, I understand that the 850 EVO incorporates better technology (32 layer 3D V-NAND) but in terms of performance, it offers little in the way of compensations.  In fact in my honest opinion, 3D V-NAND is going to be a big thing but it is certainly held back on the current SATA3 (6GB/s) interface and to charge a premium for this is a little out of order.  What you do get though is a solid 5 year warranty from a name you can trust in storage; Samsung have a solid reputation among SSD owners as being one of the best, if not the best in terms of reliability.

Overall the Samsung 850 EVO isn’t going to be any form of upgrade over the 840 EVO but if you are in the market for a new SSD and it HAS to be Samsung, then the 850 EVO is going to do nothing but put a smile on your face.  The other thing however is if you are on a “budget” and want the best bang for buck, you will have to look elsewhere…

A huge thanks to Samsung for sending the 850 EVO in for review and I look forward to seeing more from Samsung in the future.