Samsung 860 PRO 2TB SSD review - Introduction

The Samsung 860 PRO SSD 
Samsungs High-end SSDs stepping it up a notch

In this review we take a look at Samsung 860 PRO series, a 6 Gb/s SSD range available from 250GB up-to a four Terabyte in volume sizes, this new revision is fabbed with 64-cell layer V-NAND and their new MJX controller. Armed with truckloads of performance and interesting pricing, Samsung will once again set the tone and bumps up endurance levels in TBW even more as Samsung applies just 2 bits per cell. The PRO series as well will be a wide spread of products ranging from 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. 

As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 40 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices now have dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage have gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, this year we'll transition to 500 GB per SSD as the default norm with corresponding prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today,  nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has an HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. 

• New Samsung MJX Controller: faster and more accurate – operates at up to 1GHz vs 550MHz last gen
• Best in class endurance: Up to 4,800 TBW (16x compared to 850 EVO)
• Available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB

Samsung 860 Pro SSD with 2-bit per cell MLC 3D 64-layer V-NAND and the Samsung MJX controller

Samsungs 860 EVO and PRO SSD product line is powered by the company’s latest iteration NAND controller, now at revision MJX. A controller with a low power design, this drive will be amongst the faster Sata3 models ever tested, no matter what the workload is. It’s not just about performance though, it is about endurance as well. Endurance is the number of program-erase cycles an SSD has before you can't write onto it anymore, our tested 2TB model can manage 2400 TB of writes before cells die off, you may half or double that by volume size. That means a 512GB unit can manage 600TB of writes. IOPS numbers are reaching the familiar 90,000 to 100,000 marker. Overall, the 860 Pro series performance is maxed out at whatever your SATA3 interface can handle. Sequential reads performance wise are 560MB/s and write performance is set at 530 MB/s (sequential writes). Samsung guarantees the 500 TB 860 EVO and Pro both for 5 years or the TBW value (whichever comes fist), we'll list that on the next pages though.  Have a peek at the more budget-friendly 860 Pro, after which we'll dive into a rather in-depth review.