It has been a while since we've seen a new 2.5in drive from Samsung. In fact, the last one we looked at was the SSD750EVO aimed at the value end of the market. The company has been blazing a trail in the M.2 NVMe market segment of late.
The new SSD860 range is the logical successor old SSD850 range using Samsung's latest 64-layer V-NAND in place of the 48-layer V-NAND used in the 850 EVO. The new range also sees the launch of a new Samsung controller, the MJX.
In regards to performance, Samsung quote Sequential read/write figures for the 4TB SSD 860 EVO as up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. We verified these figures with the ATTO benchmark – the review drive producing a read score of 563MB/s with writes at 534MB/s.
The random read/write figures for the 860EVO are up to 98,000 IOPS for reads and 90,000 IOPS for writes. The review drive hit the read figure on the nail with a score of 98,907 IOPS while the tested write performance fell a little short of the maximum official figure at 84,761 IOPS.
The drive also supports intelligent TurboWrite, a feature which was introduced in the 960 EVO back in 2016 and a refinement of the original TurboWrite feature of the 840 EVO. Intelligent TurboWrite identifies user workloads, then defines the appropriate SLC buffer to handle the workload.
For the 4TB drive, the default TurboWrite region size is 6GB but if the workload is greater than 6GB, the additional 72GB Intelligent TurboWrite region comes into play. The Intelligent Turbo Write function takes advantage of idle capacity; if the drive doesn't have enough free space, it will not function.
The endurance figures for the new drives is very impressive. The 4TB drive has a rating of 2,400TBW, a figure which is a whopping 8 times better than the 300TBW of the previous generation 4TB 850 EVO.
We found the 4TB Samsung SSD860 EVO available to pre-order for £1,399.99 (inc VAT) on Overclockers UK HERE
Pros.
- Performance.
- Endurance rating.
- 5 year warranty.
Cons.
- Price tag is hefty.
Kitguru says: It's been a while since we've seen a new Samsung SATA based drive. The SSD860 EVO uses the latest Samsung 64-layer V-NAND which helps give the 4TB drive a huge endurance rating increase over the previous generation 850 EVO.