The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on July 11, 2016 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Destroyer isn't enough to really challenge the 4TB 850 EVO, as this test doesn't write enough data to fill the drive even halfway. The 1TB 850 Pro still holds the record for the highest average data rate maintained by a SATA drive, but the 4TB EVO is closer to that than to any slower drive.
After the 2TB 850 Pro and EVO managed to tie with the top tier of drives for average service time, it is a little disappointing to see the 4TB 850 EVO only manages to match the 1TB models, but that's still high-end performance.
The 4TB 850 EVO has slightly more extreme latency outliers than the 2TB 850s, but at the more strict threshold of 10ms it is tied with the 1TB 850 EVO for being the best TLC drive.
The 4TB 850 EVO brings a little more reduction in power use over the 2TB 850 EVO, which substantially cut power use relative to the 1TB model. The 4TB drive is clearly not paying any significant penalty for keeping so much flash and DRAM powered up.
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Eden-K121D - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Too Expensive. $999 would have been a sweet spot and a potential option for meZak - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The price will come down. Eventually.Ratman6161 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Doesn't really mater if the price goes down, its still a niche product. The EVO's are great general purpose desktop drives. But the people who need a general purpose desktop drive, mostly don't need 4TB and would not buy one at $500 let alone at $1500. In my case, I've got a 250GB Evo and a 1 TB spinning disk for storage of music, pictures, video etc. So I guess a cheap enough 2 TB SSD could work for me just because it would be marginally easier to not have two separate chunks of storage to deal with...but thats just a marginal increase in convienience. The stuff I have on a spinning disk doesn't really need the performance of an SSD anyway.I know, now someone will jump in with "well I sure need that 4 TB" but I still say that isn't the norm. I really don't believe they will sell very many of these compared to the 1 TB and below even if the price comes down.
Meteor2 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I don't need it. But it's exciting to see this progress in SSDs. It'll take a while but mass production will bring the price/size ratio down.Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
OTOH lack of competition will probably counter that to an extent... But I'm glad it exists too, if nothing else it might mean more sales on the 2TB. :pleexgx - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
was so funny when i clicked on 25% OP, but really the extra OP is really only needed for places where your writing constantly as normally the drive is Trimmed (most SSD/HDDs life is read then write, unless in a server setup that does lots of writes) the drives normal hidden OP is what 400-500MB ?beginner99 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Agree. This shows that HDDs are here to stay for another decade. The same for 4 TB in form of a HDD can be had for about $130. So that 1/10th of the SSD price and as you said for media files, you don't need an SSD at all.Impulses - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Another decade? That seems like a stretch unless you're hoarding BD tips and the like... A decade ago we didn't even have SSDs.joex4444 - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
If you have 4TB of stuff to store and it's mostly media that is accessed infrequently, it would only make sense to buy a 4TB SSD over a 4TB HDD if the prices are comparable. We've technically had SSDs for decades, it's just that they used to be in the millions of dollars per drive rather than $100 or so. Exactly how production will change to make 4TB drives cheaper isn't clear. It could be that we've already reached the lowest price per GB and all that remains is to have that scale linearly. This would mean that if 250GB drives cost $60, then a 4TB drive should cost 16 times that, or $960. Maybe some kind of discount could bring it into the $750 range, but in order to get down to $130 we need significant changes. That would put a 250GB drive on the order of $25.JimmiG - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
Of course it's not "needed" right now, but it's nice to see progress. The 6 GB HDD I used in my Pentium system was plenty at the time - I didn't "need" those fancy new 20 GB drives...