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]
The Mushkin Reactor features the same Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller found on both the Crucial BX100 and the Transcend SSD370. All three drives also feature Micron MLC NAND and consequently they all share a similar (and strong) performance profile. These drives were the last batch (early 2015) of budget drives to utilize MLC rather than TLC NAND and as a result they all have reasonably strong sustained write speeds. The more recent trend for budget drives is to utilize a small SLC write cache coupled with TLC NAND, a combination which results in severe write speed degradation upon cache exhaustion. The Mushkin Reactor doesn’t have this problem and both the 500GB and 1TB Reactors only lag the market leading 850 Evo slightly on performance. At today’s prices the 1TB Reactor offers better value for money than the market leading Samsung 850 Evo (compare them). See the current market leaders here. [May '16SSDrivePro]
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.