Samsung 850 Evo SSD: High-performance, durable 3D NAND hits the mainstream

Samsung has announced imminent arrival of the 850 Evo SSD — the first mainstream SSD that uses 3D NAND. Thanks to its fancy 3D NAND tech, the 850 Evo is one of the fastest SSDs on the market — and the longevity and reliability of 3D NAND TLC flash cells is so much better than standard planar NAND flash that Samsung offers the 850 Evo with a five-year warranty. There is one problem with the 850 Evo, however: It isn’t priced quite right for a mainstream drive.

As you may already know, the Samsung 850 Pro — especially with RAPID RAM caching enabled — is by far the best SSD money can buy. The 850 Pro’s combination of performance and durability (a 10-year warranty!) mean that nothing else really comes close. The one caveat, of course, is price — the 1TB 850 Pro will set you back around $650, while you can pick up a decent 1TB SanDisk Ultra II or Crucial M550 for about $450. The higher price is due to Samsung’s use of 3D NAND — a new breed of flash memory that, so far at least, isn’t produced by anyone else.
The purpose of the 850 Evo, then, is to bring 3D NAND (sometimes known as vertical NAND or V-NAND) to a lower, value/mainstream price point — but it doesn’t quite get there. The 850 Evo hasn’t yet hit retailers, but the 1TB drive has an MSRP of $500 — or about 10% higher than what other mainstream 1TB drives are currently going for on Newegg; the 512GB drive, at $270 MSRP, is about 15% over other mainstream drives.

Samsung 850 Evo benchmark [Image credit: Anandtech]

For those extra dollars, you get a drive that’s around 10-20% faster than the cheaper SanDisk or Crucial SSD, and much higher durability. According to Samsung, the use of 3D NAND gives the 850 Evo a massive 2,000 program/erase (P/E) cycles per cell — which, unless you like to torture your SSDs in cruel and unusual ways, will give you a drive life expectancy that’s well beyond the five-year warranty. For light’ish workloads, you could even see decades of life out of an 850 Evo. Don’t forget, this is TLC 3D NAND we’re talking about, too; not the larger, more expensive, even-more-reliable two-bit MLC 3D NAND that Samsung used in the 850 Pro.