The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

Samsung's dominance of this test wasn't being seriously challenged, but the 512GB 860 PRO does show improvement to the average data rate on The Destroyer, putting it up in the range of Samsung's multi-TB SATA drives. It's a small change, but SATA doesn't leave room for big gains.

The good average and 99th percentile latency scores of the SanDisk Ultra 3D match or beat the best scores from the Samsung SATA drives. The 512GB 860 PRO shows substantial improvement in 99th percentile latency and more modest gains in average latency, relative to the 850 PRO.

The Samsung 860 PROs show the best average read latencies in their respective product classes, but the SanDisk Ultra 3D isn't far behind. For average write latencies, the Ultra 3D takes a clear lead over the Samsung drives, and the Crucial BX300 is ahead of the Samsung drives by a hair.

The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 860 PRO show substantial improvements at 512GB, and smaller improvements among the multi-TB drives.

While the 4TB 860 PRO performed better on The Destroyer than the 512GB model by every measure, the 512GB model was more power efficient, and sets a new record for its class. The improvements relative to the 850 PRO are remarkable: the old 512GB 850 PRO required 60% more energy to complete The Destroyer than the new 512GB 860 PRO. Samsung has caught up with the modern competitors in terms of energy efficiency.