The 860 Pro is Samsung’s latest consumer-grade SATA SSD flagship, superseding the popular, but now three years old, 850 Pro. Like the 850 Pro, the 860 Pro is based on Samsung’s proprietary and revolutionary (at the time), MLC V-NAND (3D). A 10% price premium over the 256 GB 850 Pro will purchase the 256 GB 860 Pro which has an impressive 16% faster effective speed. This is achieved via an updated controller (MJX) and 64 layers of V-NAND (versus 32 layers per the 850 Pro). The 860 Pro has sequential speeds of up to 540 MB/s which almost completely saturate its SATA 3.0 interface. These peak levels of performance are slightly higher, but still comparable to the peak performance of the 860 Evo before its SLC write cache (12 GB on the 250 GB Evo) is saturated, making the 860 Evo (at around 30% cheaper) a more economical choice for users who rarely write more than 12 GB at a time. There are also reliability improvements compared to the 850 generation with Samsung now offering a warranty of 300 TBW (terabytes written) for the 256 GB 860 Pro, compared to 150 TBW for the 256 GB 850 Pro. Thanks to higher density NAND, the 860 Pro is also available in a 4 TB variant, whereas previously 2 TB was the largest capacity for a Samsung SATA MLC SSD. [Feb '18SSDrivePro]
At just 5 months old the Intel 530 Series SSD is the newest SSD in the group test. Unfortunately the 530 uses the same basic formula we have seen going back two and a half years. Sporting a Sandforce 2281 controller coupled with 20nm NAND flash the performance profile struggles with incompressible data and predictably favours reads over writes as with all the other Sandforce 2281 drives we have seen. With peak and average sequential read/write speeds of 498/154 and 454/131 MB/s the 120GB Intel 530 lags the group leaders by 50%. Small file 4K peak and average performance clocked in at 34/101 and 26/76 MB/s which is slightly above average for a leading 120GB SSD. There are faster and cheaper alternatives available in the group test. [Feb '14SSDrivePro]
Welcome to our 2.5" and M.2 SSD comparison. We calculate effective speed for both SATA and NVMe drives based on real world performance then adjust by current prices per GB to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top SSDs. [SSDrivePro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.