Samsung announced the launch of its 850 Pro earlier this year, introducing 3D Vertical NAND (VNAND) to the SSD market. 3D VNAND doubles endurance over what triple-level cell (TLC) NAND devices allowed, but simultaneously increases density – two aspects of NAND that have previously been opposed. The density increase comes as a result of stacking the NAND vertically (like an apartment highrise vs. single-home neighborhood), similar in top-level concept to Intel's 3D transistors.
The new 850 EVO promises to improve performance and endurance boosts over its preceding 840 EVO, which faced firmware controversy a few months ago (and has since been resolved). The EVO series of SSDs is known for its affordability and higher capacities, though performs slower than some of the higher-end solid-state alternatives. The price-to-performance and high capacity makes the EVO drives more viable as consumer products, including prices as low as $180 for 500GB on Black Friday.
Samsung 850 EVO Specs
Samsung's 850 Pro uses 2-bit VNAND in order to accommodate professional-class endurance and additional security features. Because consumers are generally more interested in capacity (and do not require the endurance of an enterprise SSD), the 850 EVO will use 3-bit VNAND. The extra bit means that each cell – of which there are billions – will contain an extra bit of data, ultimately allowing a higher capacity device at a lower cost. This is similar to TLC vs. MLC, which are also 3-bit vs. 2-bit cells, respectively.
The 850 EVO will be available initially in 1TB, 500GB, 250GB, and 120GB models. Initial, first-party marketing specifications indicate sequential read speeds “up to” 540MB/s – brushing against the SATA bus limitation – and write speeds of 520MB/s. 4K random write speeds were indicated at 90K IOPS on the 1TB version of the device. Samsung informed press that the 850 EVO should be able to withstand 80GB of data writes per day for five years in the 500GB & 1TB units.
We were informed that Samsung intends to launch the 850 EVO in mSATA and M.2 form factors in 2015, potentially at CES 2015.
More information can be found here: http://www.samsung.com/850evo
- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.