GRAPH LEGEND
850 Pro = Samsung 850 Pro 256G SSD inside the FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 enclosure and connected to the HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 x8 SAS adapter
840 Pro = Samsung 840 Pro 512G SSD inside the FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 enclosure and connected to the HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 x8 SAS adapter
850 EVO = Samsung 850 EVO 500G SSD inside the FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 enclosure and connected to the HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 x8 SAS adapter
840 EVO = Samsung 840 EVO 500G SSD inside the FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 enclosure and connected to the HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 2722 x8 SAS adapter
850 Pro x4 PCIe = Samsung 850 Pro 256G SSD mounted on Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe board and installed in slot 3 of a 2010 Mac Pro
850 EVO x4 PCIe = Samsung 850 EVO 500G SSD mounted on Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe board and installed in slot 3 of a 2010 Mac Pro
850 EVO Drive Bay = Samsung 850 EVO 500G SSD mounted in an Icy Dock and plugged into a 3Gbps Mac Pro factory drive bay
Test 'mule' was a 2010 Mac Pro 6-core tower running OS X Yosemite 10.10.3
RED graph bar means the fastest overall in Megabytes per Second.
LARGE SEQUENTIAL TRANSFER TEST
We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test file (and 4K frame size).
INSIGHTS
The trend continues: SSDs are becoming more affordable as the performance increases and the technology advances. Though PCIe based flash is the hot new thing, there is still much demand for SATA based SSDs.
Though we used a PCIe adapter and external eSATA enclosure for most of the testing, we included the results for the 2010 Mac Pro's 3Gbps factory drive bay to demonstrate how that means of mounting the 850 EVO internally is not a good idea. A better way to have a fast, internal boot volume or data volume is to mount the 850 EVO on a PCIe board like the Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe card we featured. Other such PCIe boards for SATA SSDs are listed in the WHERE TO BUY section of this article.
"EVO" versus "Pro"
In case you are curious, the 850 Pro has some advantages over the 850 EVO which justify the price premium:
- Longer Warranty: 10 years versus 5 years
- Higher MTBF (2 million hours versus 1.5 million hours)
- 3 core controller versus 2 core (except in the 1TB EVO which uses the 3 core)
- Slightly higher large sequential READ transfer speed
- Lower Active Read/Write Wattage (3.3/3.0W versus 3.7/4.4W)
Both use Samsung's 32-layer 3D V-NAND technology. Both use AES 256-bi Full Disk Encryption. Both offer TRIM support (though OS X Yosemite ignores it). Both have S.M.A.R.T. support. UPDATE: OS X El Capitan's 'trimforce' command enables TRIM on the Samsung SSDs and other 'non-Apple' flash storage.
FOR FURTHER READING...
Storage Review's test of the Samsung 850 EVO and Samsung 850 Pro.
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