Samsung engineers crossed 3D and TLC Hand technologies about a year ago. The result is a fundamentally new type of media - TLC V-Hand, which inherited all the main advantages of its predecessors. Thanks to this technology, the new Samsung 850 EVO SSD can offer almost the same technical capabilities as the 850 Pro, but at a relatively low price.
This hard drive is based on a completely new technology for managing three-dimensional flash memory, which combines the multi-layer structure of 3D V-Hand and low-cost TLC architecture. As a result, a mass product is emerging in the company, whose capabilities combine an excellent ratio of price, reliability and performance.
So, the hero of today's review is the Samsung SATA III 850 EVO. Let's try to identify all its advantages along with the disadvantages, taking into account the opinions of experts and reviews of ordinary users.
Specifications
Even despite all the company's innovations, the 850 EVO model remains, in some way, the heir to the previous 840 EVO line. The main components characterizing the consumer properties of the 840 model were TLC-memory, TurboWrite technology and the company's proprietary control chip (MEX).
The new SSD has almost the same set, only a newer one: instead of the old MEX controller, the updated MGX chip is used, TurboWrite technology remains, only with the “advanced” prefix, and the three-dimensional TLC V-Hand took the place of TLC-Hand.
Naturally, the most interesting innovation in the Samsung 850 EVO series was three-dimensional memory, combining TLC and 3D technology. This merger happened very organically, and the result was a reliable and inexpensive hard drive.
Advantages of the model
If we talk about the merits of the hard drive, the first thing worth mentioning is the five-year warranty on the new line. The company gives such a period to its flagship models, such as 850 Pro and Extreme Pro, which means that the brand expects Samsung 850 EVO resource no worse than from advanced SSDs. Therefore, we can confidently say that the reliability of the new model is clearly higher than the average and 850 EVO is much closer to the segment of expensive than budget hard drives.
About the same can be said about the speed characteristics of the line. The lag of EVO from the recognized leader in Pro speed is purely symbolic, and the difference is noticeable only in read operations, so there will be no noticeable drop in performance in everyday use.
Additional features and software
In addition to a good supply of resources and performance, the Samsung 850 EVO also implements other indicators of a solid drive in the form of an energy-saving DevSleep module and a hardware encryption engine based on the TCG Opal 2.0 engine with the IEEE-1667 standard, which can be controlled via standard BitLocker software in any operating system.
It can also be noted that all solid-state SSDs from Samsung are provided by one of the best and recognized Magican utilities (version 4.5 for December 2015) with support for Rapid 2.1 technology for programmatically caching RAM at input and output points. User reviews have repeatedly noted the usefulness and convenience of the software that the company’s hard drives are equipped with.
Appearance
Samsung 850 EVO 120Gb works with eight-channel architecture, and the planar TLC V-Hand, which is equipped with these drives, has 128-gigabyte cores, so more capacious modifications have more performance, although they look exactly the same.
The company uses a thin-walled aluminum case with a height of 7 mm and a size of 2.5 inches in its lines - exactly the same as in the flagship 850 Pro models. The color scheme is exclusively black, on the front of the hard drive there is a brand logo and a gray square, which is present in one form or another on all models of the company.
On the back of the hard drive there is a label that displays all the basic information about the product: name, capacity, article, barcode, serial number, etc.
Internal organization
The inside of the Samsung 850 EVO looks much more unusual than the outside. Oddly enough, but when opening the drive, the dimensions of the printed circuit board are so small, and the presence of only four microcircuits is also of interest. The dimensions of the board are clearly far from filling the entire space inside the case.
The company uses modern technological processes in its devices that can dispense with heat-conducting gaskets or any other means that remove heat from the board to the surface of the hard drive. Engineers didn’t shell out for the enhanced energy saving scheme, which allows the controller to quickly and correctly finish working with tables during sudden disconnections from the Samsung 850 EVO network. User reviews unanimously believe that the company did not include such an important element in its SSDs in vain. But this flaw applies only to the EVO line, the flagships have a scheme and work successfully.
On the boards you can see the base MGX controllers and memory chips operating on the 40-nm process technology. There you can see the RAM chips, no different from each other.
Sequential read and write operations
The speed with which the Samsung 850 EVO sequentially reads information is extremely positive. The combination of the new eight-channel MGX chip and the TLC V-Hand system allows you to overclock the SATA interface to the maximum of its capabilities, so the line speed indicators are limited only by the system bandwidth, but not by internal barriers.
As for sequential recording, the situation here is slightly different. Theoretically, and in the presence of a good system unit and in fact, sequential recording of EVO is similar to the flagship Pro, which is good news. However, when using modifications with a capacity of 250 GB or lower, the models cannot boast of high speed, and bench recording values are close to the 840 series hard drives.
Random read operations on the Samsung 850 EVO line
The review of modern SSDs is important for many enthusiasts with only one point - an indicator of random read speed. On the one hand, the processing speed of random operations is not limited by the interface, and on the other hand, a significant part of incoming requests from modern hard drives is random. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, the performance of the new hard drives has not changed much, and one could assume that progress in this part has stopped altogether. But the new EVO line running the MGX chip has shown that the potential of SATA systems in modern models is far from exhausted.
Bench tests showed that the 850 series significantly improved its performance compared to previously reached limits on random read speed. This is especially noticeable in the 500 GB versions: it has come off not only from analogues of other manufacturers, but from its line by 10-15 percent.
The leadership of the model is noticeable at any depth of requests, regardless of the queue, only the maximum sequence can be an exception. But if you take into account that such a load on desktops is almost never fixed, then you can call the Samsung 850 EVO the leader in today's reading speed.
Summarizing
Samsung has a leading position in the solid-state drive segment for a reason. Talented staff and huge production capacities allowed the brand to create interesting and versatile products that are significantly different from what competing firms offer. And today's review confirms this: combining the strengths of older models allowed the company to circumvent all the classic flaws of past lines and create a hard drive that far surpasses similar flash drives built on MLC Hand systems.
The 850 EVO is worth considering as a solid, relatively durable and high-speed external hard drive that can compete with the flagship models of other manufacturers.
The premium version of the 850 Pro is designed for people who need extraordinary reliability and the highest performance, while the 850 EVO line offers good reliability and excellent performance, but with significant savings. Therefore, if you are looking for an external drive for a conventional system that does not require huge capacities, then the Samsung 850 EVO is an ideal choice.