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  • Peichen - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Shouldn't mSATA/M.2 intereface drives be a lot faster than SATAIII drives due to the much faster interface? I was kinda expecting 1GB/sec. speed consider there are already drive tested at 1.4 and 2.7GB/sec.
  • MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    mSATA is SATA in a different formfactor. M.2 can be either SATA or PCI-E. As stated in the article, this drive comes (only) in the SATA form.
  • foxtrot1_1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    The interface is still SATA, even if the connector is M.2. I assume PCIe M.2 drives will be coming later.
  • Murloc - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    in a very short time they introduced a bunch of connectors and interfaces and it's all gotten quite confusing.
  • foxtrot1_1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Don't worry, it's not like there's also three different mainstream USB standards with two different plugs. Oh wait.

    Well, at least we have one agreed-upon display connection, that makes shopping for monitors and graphics cards easier. Oh wait.
  • lazarpandar - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    That's the great thing about standards, you've got so many to choose from!
  • yslee - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    xkcd #927 puts it very nicely. :P
  • Artuk - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Nice
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    You need yo put /sarcasm tag so people don't get confused.
  • Callitrax - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    One thing you should probably do in M.2 SSD reviews is include how the drives are keyed, preferably in one of the tables. This is important since the M.2 interface is actually 4 semi compatible "standards" (see http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/understandi... As a result not all M.2 SSDs will fit in all M.2 slots. This one appears to be both B and M keyed so I think it should be pretty universal, but as an example the Samsung XP941 is only M keyed and thus will not work in the HP Stream Mini's B keyed SSD slot. (Did whoever came up with M.2 make a crappy standard that will cause lots of customer support calls and RMA's when consumers M.2 drives don't work with their M.2 equipped computers? Yes they did.)
  • Flunk - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    This is what makes M.2 such an annoying standard. They tried to accommodate everything and ended up with compromises that don't make sense and will probably be written out of the standard in a future version.
  • setzer - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Also don't forget about the single and double sided thing as noted in the article there are some laptops that only accept single-sided.

    Also there is nothing to prevent a manafucturer to put a B+M keyed M.2 socket but only connect the USB traces. See toshiba's Z30's laptops for a pratical example.

    The joys of M.2 are great :P
  • ilkhan - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Answer: Ports should be wired and keyed for sata and pci-e.
    devices can be whatever they need.

    The keys are there to prevent a pci-e device in a sata host.
  • rtho782 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    I still don't see a reason to replace my ageing 256GB Samsung 830s in RAID 0.

    I really want a decent PCIe NVMe M.2 or SATAe SSD of about 500GB, preferably Samsung and 3D nand. But nothing :(
  • MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Looks like the 500GB model is the performance sweet spot.

    I'm not that surprised with the different performance profile on the 1TB model since it is using the older MEX controller. Could the 1TB's stuttering under steady state load be due to thermal throttling of the controller?

    I was not expecting the smaller capacity drives, particularly the 120GB model to have such (relatively) low performance. Still, compared to drives of yesteryear, performance is still quite good. My HTPC has an old 96GB Kingston V+100 but still feels pretty snappy. I'm sure that even the 120GB 850 Evo would run circles around that drive - and as such have plenty of performance for an average user.
  • sonicmerlin - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link

    Ha I have that exact same Kingston drive in my desktop. I can only install like 1 or 2 games at once, but it's totally worth it. I doubt any SSD upgrades would make my computer feel even faster than it already is.
  • Mrduder11 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    I can't remeber where I read it but should we be concerned about these drives getting too hot where it affects performance?
  • Mecharon1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Is this drive bootable? More specifically, can I install my OS on the 120GB M.2 version and use something else for bulk storage?
  • foxtrot1_1 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    That depends on the motherboard, but Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 should allow you to boot from M.2 no problem. Your BIOS is the issue.

    This is a golden age for PC hardware (at least, it will be this fall) but the proliferation of specifications and standards is really stupid. Get your act together, OEMs.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    SATA is always bootable regardless of the form factor and OS, and the 850 EVO is a SATA drive (M.2 supports both SATA and PCIe). The bootability issue only applies to PCIe M.2 drives.
  • nmm - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Uninteresting releases like this are the reason M.2 is having so much trouble gaining traction. Desktop users have no reason to choose the M.2 variant since they'll get similar performance out of a much more versatile SATA variant. The only obvious reason I can see to buy mSATA/M.2 versions of this drive is if you've got a laptop that can't slot a regular 2½" SATA drive. What a waste of shelf space.
  • bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    These are all way slow and almost outdated. INTEL and others coming out with NVMe and PCIe 3 stuff that are 2 to 4 times as fast. Big event from INTEL listed here.
    http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/PCPer-Live-...

    Best to have an X99 mobo to make them bootable. Lots of these m.2 stuff is not bootable without lots of bios messing etc. Lots of info here

    http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-ssd-...

    http://hothardware.com/reviews/Intel-SolidState-Dr...
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Those drives will cost upwards of 0.8$/GB. So you can't really compare those drives with these ones.

    Not to mention, they would be HHHL cards instead of M.2 and they use 20nm NAND which is almost 2 generations old.
  • bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Many of the m.2 sticks run very hot and manu are insertin g them into adapter cards to fit in pcie slot.
    Here is link to one....but its been removed from server and being sold before the consumer version is out. The cost is enormous because no other supply yet, but should be out to consumer in day or 2.
    http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L0LFKQW/ref=wl_it_dp_o...

    here is m.2 adapter card with heat sink for the samsung 941 ssd drive to put into pcie slot

    http://www.amazon.com/Sintech-PCI-e-Adapter-Samsun...

    but again, these early ones are difficult to make bootable, need x99 mobo and to get the nvme you need windows 8.1 which has native driver.
  • bricko - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Here is link to intels countdown clock for their big announcement on m.2 ssd

    http://www.intelgamingpromo.com/intel15b/ssd/notic...
  • bricko - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Mushkin Hyperion M.2 SSD Reaches 2.8GB/s and 350K IOPS

    http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz...
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    While I'm under NDA for that announcement, what I can tell you is that there's no M.2 coming tomorrow.
  • bricko - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Good explanation on how and what these new m.2 drives are and what you need to get them to work.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2468965/ssd...
  • SunLord - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    I was so hoping to see a m.2 42mm option from Samsung...
  • WackyDan - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Same here... So these aren't available in 42mm?
  • WackyDan - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link

    Eh... Nope. These won't work in the ThinkPads.
  • blanarahul - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Hopefully, this drive will put an end to the mSATA/M.2 versions of the 840 non-EVO that companies are shipping in their laptops.
  • Samus - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    DoH! I just paid $20 more for the M550 (basically the MX100) 512GB M2 drive, which is double-sided and needs to be crammed into my laptop :\
  • kgh00007 - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Hey, is there any chance you could fill one of these m.2 drives with data, power it off for a month then check the read speeds when you power it back on?

    I need some sort of evidence that this TLC V-nand does not have the same issues as the TLC in the 840 EVO.
    Otherwise I'm not going to be able to buy one of these!

    Cheers!
  • goodyes - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    What the hell does not the charts compares with 840 ev msata ? Bad numbers Why not true sequential test ??
    And this site posting SUCKS, Why in the world I cannot use my facebook or so login, Did you know about disquss ? Get out the absurd captcha that fucking me 30 times or so trying to get a magical potion to know what the words saying,. THIS IS NOT ADVANCE IN TECH THIS IS TRASH
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    This is the third review with the new 2015 SSD Suite and I've only had limited time to test drives, hence the lack of 840 EVO in the graphs.
  • goodyes - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Ya, but results that I have a 1TB 840 msata and write sequential at more than 500MBps around 520max MBps, and now I see than new 850 msata tops at ?? 480MBps ?? cannot be possible what my eyes look, AND WHY THE HELL NO ONE REVIEWER COMPARE With olders 840 msata, so I must think that all of you guys are a paid reviewers and you get money from samsung, if not, YOU MUST compare to older model
  • cgorange - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Other than providing samples, I can assure you that Samsung doesn't pay Anandtech to review its products
  • Ekitrak - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    The Final Words page has 2 entries of "Samsung 840 EVO mSATA" on the Amazon Price Comparison. I'm guessing this is an error and one of them is supposed to be the Sata III version?
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    I'm not seeing this -- maybe you accidentally mixed up the 850 EVO mSATA and 840 EVO mSATA as they are both in the table (or maybe this was already fixed by another editor).
  • Laststop311 - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Was really disappointed with the 1TB results. Also disappointed no ultra m2 interface. I wont be upgrading until I can get a pci-e 3.0 x4 interface on the drive. The samsung sm951 is where its at.
  • Laststop311 - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Really annoying that I dont see this drive for sale anywhere and it's been talked about for a loooong time
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    RamCity just got its first SM951 batch, so it's now available for purchase.

    https://www.ramcity.com.au/upgrade/data-storage/in...
  • bricko - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    Is the 951 NVMe - How to they compare to the new Intel 750 series which are PCIe gen 3 and NVMe
    seen here
    http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/340041-intel-l...

    http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=...

    Intel are launching the new 750 Series range of SSD's these are PCI-E 3.0 versions with 4 lanes and are NVMe based SSD's
  • goodyes - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    Ya, but results that I have a 1TB 840 msata and write sequential at more than 500MBps around 520max MBps, and now I see than new 850 msata tops at ?? 480MBps ?? cannot be possible what my eyes look, AND WHY THE HELL NO ONE REVIEWER COMPARE With olders 840 msata, so I must think that all of you guys are a paid reviewers and you get money from samsung, if not, YOU MUST compare to older model
  • KenPC - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    I am seriously concerned that the 840 evo, and TLC in general may indeed have an uncurable problem with slowdown after a period of time. This same problem has also been reported in multiple instances for Samsung OEM drives based on the 840 evo TLC technology.

    GIven that the 850 evo msata line was delayed by Samsung by about a month, it might be possible that the Anandtech review units were actually tested in late Feb and the go-ahead to publish the results only recently provided.

    I did also notice that the estimated 'March" timeframe for a new 840 evo firmware has come and passed, as well as no drive magician support for the 850 evo m2/msata drives yet.

    Anandtech results for the 1TB 850 evo unit are also quite concerning.

    So, I also join the crowd asking for a look at the 850 evo 2.5 and msata drives after some time has passed to see if they suffer from the slowdown problem too.

    And a rhetorical, but serious question - does anybody actually have a Samsung TLC drive that has NOT suffered from the slowdown as measured by the proper tools a few months after the drive was formatted/set up?

    And kudos to Anandtech - for an SSD review that really tests the drives, not just a run of ATTO or such.
  • Per Hansson - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link

    "anything that taxes the drive a bit more may run into the issue, which is basically that the drive stops for up to dozens of seconds (i.e. your system freezes). Until Samsung fixes that, I would advise against buying the 1TB version unless you have a very light workload (web browsing, email, etc.). I suspect it's fixable through a firmware update, but I'll have to wait for Samsung's reply to be sure of that."

    A wise man once said: if you wait for a firmware fix for your Samsung SSD's you will wait a long time.
    He died of old age.
    RIP Samsung 840 TLC drives.
  • Dzungpv - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link

    Missing Temperature when idle, full load or stretch, i want this information before buy them .
  • szhosain - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link

    As far as I can tell, you only tested the M.2 version of the Samsung 850 EVO in a 500GB size.

    Can we assume that the MSATA version of that drive and size will perform essentially identically?
  • voicequal - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link

    Good catch on the poor mSATA 1TB performance during the performance consistency test. It harkens back to the early Jmicron stuttering days. I was similarly affected by the SanDisk U100 a few years ago. The system freezes, particularly when swap file is active, and disk throughput drops to low single digit MB/s. Hard to believe the most modern SSDs can still get into this state. Vanilla benchmarks don't show the problem.
  • cleverdude - Saturday, April 18, 2015 - link

    Bench results have not been updated.
    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
  • szhosain - Monday, May 4, 2015 - link

    On my Lenovo W530 laptop (about 3 years old now), I just installed a Samsung 850 EVO MSATA 1TB card, and ATTO shows me poorer numbers than seen here. About 267 MB/sec for write and 280 MB/sec for read when it peaks. My 2.5" SSD drives (from OCZ) in the same system are well over 500 MB /sec.

    Does this perhaps mean that the MSATA interface on this laptop is limited to 3 GB/sec rather than the 6 GB /sec on the standard SATA interfaces?

    That would be quite irritating!
  • Ethos Evoss - Sunday, June 21, 2015 - link

    When it comes to mSATA or M.2 connected to SATA III there is no point purchase stupid expensive SSDs as they will perform same as cheapest ones ..
    So best mSATA/m.2 SSD for SATA III use is the plextor or mushkin (i preffer plextor) which cost less and has great performance
  • Andrew Field - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

    This Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA constantly overheats. This is especially the case when copying large files. It rises about 10C every 30-60 seconds, and does not stop until its own overheating protection kicks in. This occurs when it is in a laptop or in an external enclosure (even when open and exposed to the air).

    Initially I thought I had a bad piece of hardware, but I tested 5 separate units with consistent results.

    If anyone decides to test this out, I did the following:
    - Step 1: Select a folder with at least 100GB of data
    - Step 2: Copy said folder to a new folder (on the same Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA)
    - Step 3: Monitored the temperature
    Result: The temperature begins rising sharply in a few seconds, and does not stop rising until the SSD engages its overheating protection.
  • greywarden - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link

    I was about to purchase (4) 250GB 850 EVO mSATA drives to put in an Addonics quad mSATA PCIe card, but seeing the latency numbers on the drive has me concerned. Should I look into purchasing a pair of the 500GB models instead? Have the pausing and crashing problems been solved with the 1TB model yet?
  • payamfi - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    Hi guys i wanna buy a memmory for my n551jx i can not decide what to buy msata evo mini or ssd evo pro can anyone help me out?
  • fabbrimichele75 - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link

    Would it be possible to know the temperature when the disk is in idle and full load?
    I'm mainly interested in the M.2 version.

    I'm asking because I wanted to mount it on an NUC 6i5 that seems to be sensitive to high temperature.
  • yolomolo - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link

    Can i get some advice from you PRO, should i better go get mSata : Samsung EVO 850 or CRUCIAL MX200 ?

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