Samsung 850 EVO 1TB 3D V-NAND SSD Review

Futuremark PCMark 8 Extended - Consistency Test

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.0.228

Heavy Usage Model:

Futuremark's PCMark 8 allows us to wear the test drive down to a reasonable consumer steady state, and then watch the drive recover on its own through garbage collection. To do that, the drive gets pushed down to steady state with random writes, and then idle time between a number of tests allows the drive to recover.

Precondition Phase:

1. Write to the drive sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data.

2. Write the drive through a second time (to take care of overprovisioning).

Degradation Phase:

1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for ten minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat one and two, eight times, and on each pass, increase the duration of random writes by five minutes.

Steady state Phase:

1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for 50 minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat one and two, five times.

Recovery Phase:

1. Idle for five minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat one and two, five times.

PCMark 8's Consistency test provides a ton of data output that we use to judge a drive's performance. Here we see the three states of performance for the select SSDs, light use, consumer steady state, and worst case.

Storage Bandwidth - All Tests

Without RAPID, the 850 EVO performs very well in comparison to other 1TB class SSDs on the market today. The SanDisk Extreme PRO and 850 Pro are both faster, and the Corsair Neutron XT is slightly faster under heavy workloads.

Storage Bandwidth - Heavy Load

With RAPID enabled, the 850 EVO catches up to the Neutron XT under heavy workloads, but things get interesting under typical consumer workloads.

Storage Bandwidth - Typical Consumer Load

The 850 EVO with RAPID enabled dominates the performance chart in typical consumer workloads.