Provantage
By employing both of these technologies, Samsung’s 3D V-NAND is able to provide better scaling than planar NAND flash, at least according to Samsung’s data. This latest V-NAND, in conjunction with the new controller and firmware tweaks also allowed Samsung to increase the endurance ratings on these drives, versus the previous-gen 850 EVO. There are only a couple of gtx 1090 pieces of flash memory on board, along with some DDR4 DRAM cache and a controller. The Samsung MJX controller used here is new and reportedly improves host communication performance and improves compatibility with Linux, though it is the same controller found on the Pro model. The LPDDR4 cache will vary in size depending on the capacity, but will max out at 4GB.
The SSD comes in a black-colored box this time, which is the exact opposite of what we’ve seen on its previous 850 EVO that comes in a white-color package. From the design of the box, we can definitely see that Samsung is basically telling you how good their product is with a rather ballsy claim of ‘The SSD that makes the difference’. With the 850 EVO highly regarded as one of the best 2.5-inch SATA SSD you can get during its time, it’s only natural that many would expect to see some improvement and better performance on the 860 EVO. “The 860 EVO has half the endurance of the new 860 Pro, but it’s still quite a bit more than competing products. It’s a good argument, but who really cares?” Well, I do. For that reason I only buy the Pro ones and I’d buy the EVOs above all the others if the Pro weren’t available.
The 860 EVO is delivering to us 12K 4K random read IOPS at QD1. It is important to keep in mind that Intelligent TurboWrite SLC technology is boosting performance here. Samsung Magician software is SSD toolbox software that makes monitoring and maintaining your Samsung SSD a simple task. With Magician you can enable Samsung’s RAPID DRAM assisted SSD caching technology if you are running in AHCI mode. Samsung’s new Intelligent TurboWrite technology is dynamic in nature. Intelligent TurboWrite automatically determines how much space to allocate to the EVO’s TurboWrite cache region based on the workload demand.
Photoshop used to take approx 2 mins to open, now approx 20 secs. Illustrator used to take approx 2.5 mins, now opens in approx 25 secs. I had to pull very hard and it did unseat the locking clamp that holds the ribbon cable to the board, but it was easy to push down the clamp and plug in the SSD. You will need to order a data transfer cable ($4 e-Bay) to be able to run Samsung’s data transfer app. I went from a 500gb HDD that was at 95% capacity to a 1tb SSD. it won’t let me post details but please see the attached photo.
Class-leading performance at a reasonable price is always TweakTown recommended. Looking back at our testing results, one thing becomes crystal clear – the 860 EVO is the second best performing SATA SSD on the market. The only better performing SATA SSD is Samsung’s own 860 Pro. The 860 EVO gtx 1080 8gb easily outperforms competing SATA SSDs including more expensive MLC powered competitors. This testing is just to see what the drive is capable of in an FOB state under optimal conditions. We are utilizing empty volumes of Windows bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit for this testing.