Samsung 850 EVO 2TB SSD Review

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INTRODUCTION

It may have taken some time to happen especially since consumer oriented solid state drives (SSDs) have been around for quite some time now but right now they've pretty much saturated the SATA III (6Gb/s) connectivity (although not really in constant/continuous performance) and so until and if something new comes along to replace that interface as well (remember we still have PCIex, M.2 and SAS drives for higher performance levels so that may never happen) manufacturers have chosen to focus on the next best thing which is the release of much higher capacity models aimed towards demanding users and applications. In 2013 and 2014 we did witness the introduction of 960GB/1TB SSD models by quite a few manufacturers but since the capacity gap between regular SSDs and HDDs is still quite large 2TB models have just been introduced into the market with 4TB ones announced to arrive in the coming months (Q1 2016 probably). The 850 EVO line of SSDs by Samsung may have been around for roughly 10 months now but it wasn't until last month that the 2TB variant was announced (along with the 850 Pro 2TB model) and today we are going to dig deeper and see what consumers can expect from it.



Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in technology, opening new possibilities for people everywhere. Through relentless innovation and discovery, we are transforming the worlds of televisions, smartphones, personal computers, printers, cameras, home appliances, LTE systems, medical devices, semiconductors and LED solutions. We employ 236,000 people across 79 countries with annual sales of US$187.8 billion. Samsung's Memory Business offers the industry's most advanced and extensive range of memory semiconductor products. As a leader in both the design and manufacture of memory semiconductor since 1993, the business provides key memory products including dynamic random access memory (DRAM), static random access memory (SRAM), NAND flash memory, Solid State Drives (SSD) and a range of green memory solutions for use in PC, server and mobile applications. Samsung is also leading the industry in advancements of next generation DRAM and NAND flash technologies while nurturing future memory technologies. To discover more, please visit www.samsung.com.



As you may have figured out by the model name the specifications of the 850 EVO 2TB SSD are very similar with the rest of the line (even more with the 1TB variant) so once again Samsung used their very own 32 layer 3D 3-bit (vertical) V-NAND which they have paired with their new 3-core MHX controller (lower capacity models have 2-core ones) and 2GB of LPDDR3 DRAM cache memory. As usual features include Samsung's TurboWrite technology (a small amount of SLC NAND flash is used to accelerate write performance), full TRIM support, RAID support (with a RAID controller), S.M.A.R.T, Garbage Collection, AES 256 bit encryption (full disk), TCG/Opal & IEEE-1667 support and DevSleep mode. Unfortunately since the 850 EVO is primarily aimed towards consumers it has a rating of 150 TBW (terabytes written) and is covered by a 5 year warranty as opposed to the 850 Pro 2TB model which has a rating of 300 TBW and is covered by a 10 year warranty.