14 DAY TRIAL // Although having less space than HDDs, solid space drives have much better performance than classic plate-based drives. Even though high-capacity SSDs do exist in the shape of PCIe connected or SATA connected drives, these usually come at a hefty price, keeping the main market demand still in favor of HDDs.
However, Samsung SSDs, the non-Samsung HDDs division that's now under Seagate, launched its new 850 Evo and 850 Pro SSDs that come with 2TB of storage space and also have quite an affordable price.
However, the 850 Evo and Pro came around last year and were limited to only 1TB of memory, now the company doubled that storage space, rivaling with mainstream consumer HDDs that barely jump the 1-2TB of space.
The new Pro and Evo models keep the same design and form factor of 7-millimeter, 2.5-inch aluminum case as their predecessors did. And are based on MHX controllers that are probably based on a 3-core ARM Cortex just as its 340 predecessors.
Affordability is a must
Being based on the company's triple-level cell 3D V-NAND flash memory, the 350s are probably some of the most affordable solid-state drives on the market. Although being only second in performance to PCIe drives, the Sequential read performance of the 850 Evo is up to 540MB/s, while write performance is claimed to be up to 520MB/s. The Samsung 850 Pro SSD uses the same 3D V-NAND flash memory and has generally the same read/write performance, with only the read performance being 10MB/s higher than the Evo.
The 850 Pro SSDs have a 100000 input/output operations-per-second (IOPS) and write speeds of 90000 IOPS.
These SSDs are indeed a step further in increasing affordability among high-capacity solid state drives consumers and Samsung may very well profit from this development enormously. Having good sales on its portable HDDs like the 4TB M3 and P3 series, the 850 will clearly push forwards Samsung's market leadership against its main rivals, especially Intel and Western Digital.
According to Hexus, prices will be around €897 ($989) for the Evo and €1,057 ($1,165) for the Pro.