Samsung SSD 860 EVO Solid State Drive Review

By Olin Coles

Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Product Name: 860 EVO Solid State Drive
Part Number: MZ7LH500HMJD
Model Number: MZ-76E500 (MZ-76E500BW)
UPC: 88726231631 EAN: 8806088931777
Price As Tested: $169.99 (Amazon | Newegg)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Samsung.

Samsung recently announced their latest 3-bit MLC V-NAND flash technology, which they’ve baked into their new SSD 860 EVO solid state drive series. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the 500GB Samsung SSD 860 EVO, which pairs their 64-cell layer V-NAND and 512MB LPDDR4 DRAM cache buffer with their new MJX controller to produce up to 550 MB/s reads at 98,000 IOPS and 520 MB/s writes at 90,000 IOPS, and compare SATA 6 GB/s performance against the all the leading competition.

It’s been three years since Samsung last released a solid state drive for the SATA 6GB/s interface, which we covered in our Samsung SSD 850 EVO Solid State Drive Review. The primary difference hardware between then and now is their 64-cell layer V-NAND architecture, which now delivers twice as much capacity per IC. This allows Samsung to offer their new 860 EVO in capacities up to 4TB. That same improvement also doubles reliability, as the Total Bytes Written (TBW) jumps from 150TB for the 500GB 850 EVO to 300TB for their new 500GB 860 EVO.

If you’ve kept up with technology news, you might have been misled into believing the SATA 6Gb/s interface was made obsolete by speedy M.2 2280 form factor on the PCIe 3.0 interface. This is not true. The Samsung 860 EVO is a 2.5″ solid state drive made for the SATA 6Gb/s interface, which is still widely utilized by most desktop computers and notebook PCs. The Samsung 860 EVO series accommodates SATA, mSATA, and M.2 interfaces.

Samsung 860 EVO Specifications

Bandwidth Speed vs Operational Performance

Solid State Drive performance revolves around two dynamics: bandwidth speed (MB/s) and operational performance I/O per second (IOPS). These two metrics work together, but one may be more important than the other depending on the workload. Consider this analogy: bandwidth determines how much cargo a ship can transport in one voyage, and operational IOPS performance is how fast that ship moves back and forth. By understanding this and applying it to SSD storage, there is a clear importance set on each variable depending on the task at hand.

For casual users, especially those with laptop or desktop computers that have been upgraded to use an SSD, the naturally quick response time is enough to automatically improve the user experience. Bandwidth speed is important, but only to the extent that operational performance meets the minimum needs of the system. If an SSD has a very high bandwidth speed but a low operational performance, it will take longer to load applications and boot the computer’s Operating System than another SSD that offers higher IOPS performance.