Samsung 850 Evo M.2 & SATA Review

The Samsung EVO drives are probably the most popular line of drives currently on the market.  They are popular for good reason.  They offer superior read/write speeds, along with excellent reliability.  Check out the video for a quick look at the drives and benchmarks.

Samsung 850 EVO M.2 vs. Sata

M.2 drives burst onto the desktop seen not too long ago.  They offer the advantage of being extremely compact, and can take advantage of the faster PCI-e M.2 slot.  Modern SSD drives have reached the limits of SATA III.  Current SATA III ports can’t offer any more bandwidth.  These current Samsung M.2 drive in the EVO line still uses the older SATA controller, so it does not offer the 1000+Mbps that you can expect from high end PCI-e drives.

850 EVO 250GB M.2 Drive

The M.2 version of Samsung’s 850 EVO drive is an interesting device.  Because it still uses the older Sata 6 controller it doesn’t offer the speed enhancements some expect from M.2 drives.  This drive is ideally suited for mobile applications or small form factor builds.  However if you have a full sized PC with an empty M.2 slot these are with the consideration if only to reduce the amount of cables and clutter in your system.

The M.2 drives are about a quarter of the size and weight of the standard SATA drives.  They also only use between 3.5 & 4.7 Watts of power.  Down from the 4.7-7.2 Watts the SATA drives use.

850 EVO 250GB/500GB SATA Drives

The 850 EVO SATA drives are the go to drives for most consumers.  They offer industry leading performance for affordable prices.  All the 850 EVO drives come with a 5 year or 75 TBW warranty.

According to the official Samsung spec sheet they offer slightly faster Random Read/Write speeds, however in testing the real world speeds were virtually identical.

If you want the absolute highest level of performance you can upgrade to the 850 EVO Pro line.  However the performance gains for average consumers won’t justify the increase in prices.

Included Software

Samsung Magician and Samsung Data Migration 3.0 are both included with the 850 EVO line of SSD’s. The data migration software was intuitive and extremely easy to use. You can easily clone or partition Samsung drives very quickly.

The Samsung Magician software allows you to fine tune the performance of your drives, as well as updating your firmware.

How I Used The Drives

If you would like to know how I used the drives, you can check out Part 2 of my build log.  You can watch it here.