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Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested
MojoKid writes Samsung just took the wraps off a new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company's current flagship SSD 850 PRO, but the new EVO is Samsung's first to pack 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash memory. The move to 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND. The new 850 EVO drive performs well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depth were fast. Small file transfers with low queues depths, which is what you'd expect to see with most client workloads, were also very good. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives also put up excellent numbers in trace-based tests like PCMark 7.
According to AnandTech, they move from 20nm back up to 40nm for this tech!
The summary fails to mention the 5 year warranty, which is obviously quite fantastic. It was only a few years ago many hard drive manufacturers were cutting back from 3 years to 1. A quick survey of amazon indicates many HDDs are currently offering a 2 year warranty. I'd be peeved if a drive died at 2 1/2 years. 5 1/2, not so much.