Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SATA III M.2 SSD Review

Introduction

Samsung's 850 EVO M.2 is the world's first 3D flash on a gumstick SSD. Samsung engineered the 850 EVO M.2 to deliver class leading performance and power efficiency in the smallest form factor available today. Designed around Samsung's own V-NAND 32-layer 3D flash technology, the 850 EVO M.2 SSD can deliver loads of performance, and years of endurance, all the while using far less power than the current competition. The 850 EVO M.2 is roughly 30% more power efficient than planar flash based TLC SSD's, without sacrificing a drop of performance.

A lower power requirement means the 850 EVO M.2 will provide longer battery life and lower operating temperatures. This makes the newest member of the EVO family of SSD's ideal for today's Ultrabook's and tablets, where space is constrained, battery life is prized and cool operation is harder to achieve. The 850 EVO is DevSleep (Device Sleep) enabled, requiring only 2mW of power to maintain operational status.

The heart of the 850 EVO M.2 is Samsung's power efficient dual-core MGX controller. The MGX is AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption (FDE), TCG/Opal V2.0, and Encrypted Drive (IEEE-1667) compatible. As with all drives in the EVO family, the 850 EVO M.2 is RAPID capable if you wish to extract even more performance from your system. To enhance write performance, the 850 EVO's Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is capable of programming a portion of the drive's flash array to operate as Single Level Cell (SLC). Samsung's proprietary pseudo SLC technology is called TurboWrite.

Samsung's fixed pool TurboWrite technology accelerates the drive's write speed by allocating a portion of drive capacity to single bit per cell programming. The 850 EVO is capable of outperforming any SATA-based SSD on the market, including Samsung's own 850 Pro, as long as data transfers occur within the drives TurboWrite layer.

Samsung's 850 EVO M.2 is loaded with features and value that separate it from the field of contenders even before we insert performance into the equation. Let's see how well Samsung's newest drive performs and whether or not its tiny form factor sacrifices speed for size.

Specifications

Samsung's 850 M.2 SATA III SSD is available in three capacities: 120GB, 250GB, and 500GB. Sequential read performance for the 850 EVO M.2 is listed at up to 540MB/s. Sequential write performance is listed at up to 500 MB/s. Sequential write performance varies outside of the drives TurboWrite layer, with the 120GB capacity delivering a non-TurboWrite assisted sequential write speed of 150 MB/s and the 250GB 850 EVO M.2 300 MB/s. The 500GB 850 EVO M.2 maintains a sequential write speed of 500 MB/s even after exceeding the drives TurboWrite layer.

The 850 EVO delivers up to 97,000 random read IOPS and 89,000 random write IOPS at QD32. QD1 random performance is rated at up to 10,000/40,000 IOPS. LBA addressing is handled by a single 512MB LPDDR3 Samsung DRAM package at all three capacity points. The two smaller capacities are warranted for up to 75 terabytes TBW (Total Bytes Written) and the 500GB drive for 150 TBW, or five years, whichever comes first.

Power consumption is listed at 2.4W max for read, 3.5W max for write. Idle power consumption is listed at 50mW max and Device Sleep power consumption is listed at 2mW. The 850 EVO M.2 is FDE and Encrypted drive capable.