SSD-drive Samsung 850 EVO: an overview, description, features and reviews

The engineers of the company "Samsung" about a year ago crossed the technology of 3D and TLC Hand. As a result, a fundamentally new type of media - TLC V-Hand, which inherited all the main advantages of its predecessors - was obtained. With this technology, the new Samsung 850 EVO SSD can offer virtually the same technical capabilities as the 850 Pro, but at a relatively low price.

This hard drive is based on a completely new technology for managing three-dimensional flash memory, which combines a multi-layered structure 3D V-Hand and inexpensive TLC architecture. As a result, the company has a massive product, whose capabilities combine an excellent balance of price, reliability and productivity.

So, the hero of today's review is Samsung SATA III 850 EVO. Let's try to identify all its advantages along with shortcomings, taking into account the opinions of specialists and reviews of ordinary users.

Specifications

Even despite all the innovations of the company, the 850 EVO, remains, in some way, the heir of the previous line of 840 EVO. The main components characterizing the consumer properties of the 840 model were TLC-memory, TurboWrite technology and the company's controlling chip company (MEX).

The new SSD set is almost the same, only the newer: instead of the old MEX controller, the updated MGX chip is used, and the TurboWrite technology remained, only with the "advanced" accessory, and the TLC-Hand was replaced by the three-dimensional TLC V-Hand.

Naturally, the most interesting innovation in the Samsung 850 EVO series was the three-dimensional memory that connected TLC and 3D technologies. This merger happened very organically, and as a result, a reliable and inexpensive hard drive was obtained.

Advantages of the model

If we talk about the advantages of a hard drive, the first thing worth mentioning is a five-year warranty for a new line. This time the company gives its flagship models, such as 850 Pro and Extreme Pro, which means that the brand expects from the Samsung 850 EVO resource is not worse than the advanced SSD. Therefore, we can say with confidence that the reliability of the new model is clearly above the average and 850 EVO is much closer to the segment of expensive than budget hard drives.

Approximately the same can be said about the speed characteristics of the ruler. Lagging EVO from the recognized leader in speed Pro is purely symbolic, and the difference is noticeable only on read operations, so in the daily use of the performance drop will not be noticeable.

Additional features and software

In addition to a good supply of resources and performance, the Samsung 850 EVO also features other high-performance drives in the form of an energy-saving DevSleep module and a hardware encryptor on the TCG Opal 2.0 engine with the IEEE-1667 standard, which can be managed via standard BitLocker software in any operating system.

It can also be noted that all solid-state SSDs from Samsung are provided with one of the best and recognized Magican utilities (version 4.5 as of December 2015) with support for Rapid 2.1 technology for software caching of RAM at the input and output points. Customer feedback has repeatedly noted the usefulness and convenience of software, which are equipped with hard drives of the company.

Appearance

Samsung 850 EVO 120Gb works with the eight-channel architecture, and the planar TLC V-Hand, which is equipped with these drives, has 128-gigabit cores, so more powerful modifications have more performance, although they look quite the same.

The company in its lineup uses a thin-walled aluminum body 7 mm high and 2.5 inches in size - exactly the same as the flagship 850 Pro models. The color scheme is exceptionally black, on the front part of the hard drive there is a brand logo and a gray square, which is present in one form or another on all models of the company.

On the back of the hard drive there is a label, where all the basic information about the product is reflected: name, capacity, article, bar code, serial number, etc.

Internal organization

The interior of the Samsung 850 EVO looks much more unusual than the outside. Strangely enough, but when the drive is opened, the small dimensions of the PCB are surprising, and the presence of only four chips is also of interest. The board's dimensions are clearly far from filling the entire space inside the case.

The company uses modern technological processes in its devices, which allow to do without heat-conducting gaskets or any other means that divert heat from the board to the surface of the hard drive. Do not become engineers to fork out and for a strengthened scheme of energy savings, allowing the controller to quickly and correctly complete the work with the tables during a sudden outage from the network Samsung 850 EVO. User reviews unanimously believe that the company did not include such an important element in its SSD in vain. But this defect concerns only the EVO line, the flagships are present and working successfully.

On the boards you can see the basic MGX controllers and memory chips running on the 40-nm process technology. In the same place, you can see the RAM chips that do not differ from each other.

Consecutive read and write operations

The speed with which the Samsung 850 EVO sequentially reads information, causes extremely positive emotions. The combination of the new eight-channel MGX chip and the TLC V-Hand system allows overclocking the SATA interface to the maximum of its capabilities, so the speed indicators of the line are limited only by the system's throughputs, but not by internal barriers.

As for sequential recording, the situation here is slightly different. Theoretically, and in the presence of a good system unit and in fact, the sequential EVO recording is analogous to the flagship Pro, which can not but rejoice. However, when using modifications of 250 GB or less, models can not boast of high speed, and the benchmark values of recording are close to 840 series hard drives.

Random read operations on the Samsung 850 EVO line

Overview of modern SSD for many enthusiasts is important only one item - an indicator of the speed of random reading. On the one hand, the processing speed of random operations is not limited to the interface, and on the other hand - a significant part of the incoming requests from modern hard drives has a random character. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, the performance of the new HDDs has not changed much, and one could assume that progress in this part has stopped at all. But the new EVO line running the MGX chip showed that the potential of SATA systems in modern models is far from exhausted.

Benchmark tests showed that the 850 series significantly improved its performance compared to previously reached limits of the speed of random reading. This is especially noticeable in the modifications of 500 GB: it has come off not only from analogues of other manufacturers, but from its lineup by 10-15 percent.

Leadership of the model is noticeable at any depth of queries regardless of the queue, except there can be only a maximum order. But if you take into account that such a load at desktops is almost never fixed, then we can call Samsung 850 EVO the leader of today on the speed of reading.

Summarizing

The company "Samsung" occupies a leading position in the segment of solid-state drives for a reason. Talented staff and huge production capacity allowed the brand to create interesting and versatile products that are significantly different from what competing firms offer. And today's review is a confirmation: combining the strengths of the old models allowed the company to bypass all the classic shortcomings of past rulers and create a hard drive that far exceeds the similar flash drives built on MLC Hand systems.

The 850 EVO is worth considering as a solid, relatively durable and high-speed external hard drive that is able to compete with the flagship models of other manufacturers.

The premium version in the face of the 850 Pro is designed for people who need extraordinary reliability and high performance, while the 850 EVO line offers good reliability and excellent performance, but with significant savings. Therefore, if you are looking for an external drive for a conventional system that does not require huge capacities, then the Samsung 850 EVO is an ideal choice.