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 250GB Samsung 850 Evo has a similar architecture to its hugely successful predecessor, the 840 Evo. Both drives are TLC based but the 850 uses 3D V-NAND as opposed to regular NAND. Both drives also feature a Turbowrite cache (TWC) which buffers up to 3GB of writes. The TWC enables high burst write speeds but when the cache exhausts write speeds drop to 300 MB/s. Comparing the 850 and 840 Evos shows that effective speed, has improved by 11% and the warranty has been extended from three to five years but prices are also up by 11%. The 850 Evo does put in superb benchmarks (second only to the 850 Pro) but these are only valid within the TWC. At current price levels the 850 Evo struggles to compete with the value leaders. [Dec '14SSDrivePro]
Welcome to our 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.