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As for the actual performance of the new Samsung 850 Pro 2TB, it's all about expectations. Or rather, it's about managing expectations.
Thanks to its 2TB capacity, this isn't a cheap drive. In fact, predictably enough it's painfully pricey. If you therefore go in expecting it to render all asunder, you are in for a big disappointment.
If, on the other hand, you accept it for what it is, a very large SATA drive as opposed to a drive that's compatible with the latest super-fast PCI Express storage interfaces, you're liable to be much happier.
Specifications
Here is the spec sheet provided to TechRadar:
- Capacity: 2TB
- Memory type: 3D VNAND
- Controller: Samsung MHX
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps
- Form factor: 2.5-inch
- Read / write performance: 550MB/s / 520MB/s
- IOPS performance: 100,000 read, 90,000 write
- Warranty: 10 years limited
Performance
Here's how the 850 Pro 2TB performs. In terms of raw sequential throughput, it'll do 559MB/s for read and 534MB/s for writes. In other words, it's simply bouncing off the limitations of the SATA interface.
As for random access performance, we're talking 41MB/s for reads and 133MB/s for writes, which are again as good as it gets for a SATA drive.
Arguably more interesting is the fact that the 850 Pro 2TB clocks in with probably the fastest time we've seen for a SATA drive in our real-world 5GB file compression test. It's only a matter of a second or two, but it's further confirmation that this drive is about as good as it gets for SATA technology.
For context, the latest M.2 drives are up near 2GB/s for sequential reads and 200MB/s for 4k random writes. So how you view this drive's performance will ultimately come down to whether you're in the market for M.2 or SATA drives. It's great for a SATA drive, deathly slow in some departments compared to an M.2 drive.
