Conclusion

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With the 850 PRO Samsung has launched the successor of the 840 PRO, which was amongst the very fastest drives, when it was launched about one year ago. Compared to the 840 PRO the 850 PRO basically features the same controller, that clocks 100 MHz quicker. What's way more important than the updated controller is the fact, that this drives uses 3D V-NAND, which offers higher reliability as well as higher performance than standard MLC NAND flash memory.

In terms of raw performance our test drive was able to score 531 MB/s sequential write and 548 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured as near as makes no difference 100'000 IOPS regarding random read and 91'000 regarding random write. In the case of sequential read as well as sequential write we see that the SATA-III interface is being maxed out and therefore performance is where it should be. Apart from these values we also noticed consistent performance regarding our different queue depth tests. 

Last but not least there is the pricing. The Samsung 850 PRO 128GB costs 98 Euro, the 850 PRO 256 GB accounts for 150 Euro, the 512 Gigabyte model is 304 Euro and the 1 Terabyte model sells for 530 Euro. Price per gigabyte is therefore somewhere inbetween 0.77 and 0.52 Euro, which is basically at the top end compared to the competition.

Should you be looking for one of the fastest consumer SSDs money can buy, then the 850 PRO should definitely be considered.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - QD1/4/8/16/32 Performance
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Conclusion
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch