Samsung Ssd 860 Evo M 2 Sata Review
While the price of DRAM continues to fall, the price of Flash memory falls even faster. The “Flash becomes cheaper than DRAM” crossover point occurred approximately 2004. SSDs based on 3D XPoint have higher random but lower sequential read/write speeds than their NAND-flash counterparts. In the late 1980s, Zitel offered a family of DRAM based SSD products, under the trade name “RAMDisk,” for use on systems by UNIVAC and Perkin-Elmer, among others.
But when additional SSDs are added to a server, CPU performance causes a data bottleneck. So, even while omitting a component that helps an SSD go quickly, Samsung’s 980 still seems very fast. In case you’re curious, Samsung’s test systems that provided these benchmarks run an Intel Core i7-6700K, the Ryzen X, and 8GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 RAM. The whole thing appears to be designed for cost, and I am guessing a two-sided gtx 1080 8gb design was the most cost efficient layout(Don’t have to double stack NAND dies?). Did you take any picture of the device with the sticker removed, would be interested to see how they chose to populate this. Historically, Samsung has distanced itself from making true entry-level drives for the retail SSD market, preferring to hold onto some degree of premium status and retain a more comfortable profit margin.
The flash layer in these drives can be accessed independently from the magnetic storage by the host using ATA-8 commands, allowing the operating system to manage it. For example, Microsoft’s ReadyDrive technology explicitly stores portions of the hibernation file in the cache of these drives when the system hibernates, making the subsequent resume faster. Form factors which were more common to memory modules are now being used by SSDs to take advantage of their flexibility in laying out the components. Some of these include PCIe, mini PCIe, mini-DIMM, MO-297, and many more.
SSDs can use traditional HDD interfaces and form factors, or newer interfaces and form factors that exploit specific advantages of the flash memory in SSDs. Traditional interfaces (e.g. SATA and SAS) and standard HDD form factors allow such SSDs to be used as drop-in replacements for HDDs in computers and other devices. Newer form factors such as mSATA, M.2, U.2, NF1, XFMEXPRESS and EDSFF and higher speed interfaces such as NVM Express over PCI Express can further increase performance over HDD performance.
Enterprise flash devices are designed to handle the demands of tier-1 application with performance and response times similar to less-expensive SSDs. The benefit of using a current HDD form factor would be to take advantage of the extensive infrastructure already in place to mount and connect the drives to the host system. These traditional form factors are known by the size of the rotating media (i.e., 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch) and not the dimensions of the drive casing.
3D Xpoint is entirely different from NAND flash and stores data using different principles. Although we are showing you the M.2 flavor of the Samsung SSD 860 EVO here, the drives are actually offered in the more common 2.5” and mSATA form factors as well. In terms of their features and performance, however, all of the drives will perform similarly – it’s only their form factors and available capacities that are different. The 2.5-inch SATA solid-state drive aims for a speeder ride than its predecessor and offers storage options from 250GB to 4TB. Samsung has not yet presented a successor for the EVO 860 in the M.2 SSD form factor. Likely, the EVO 870 will never be released as an M.2 SSD. Prime Computer customers have the option of ordering the PrimeMini with an M.2 Samsung PRO bit NVMe SSD, which is significantly faster than a SATA EVO 870 SSD.