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Today we have the latest model from the Samsung SSD 850 Evo on hand, the mouth-watering 2TB model. Previously the 850 Evo range extended to a 1TB model but for those that find that simply wasn’t enough, Samsung has doubled the capacity and in the process created what is by far the largest capacity 2.5” SSD on the market.. The very first SSD that I used day to day in my main PC was the Intel X25-M 80GB and it was a considerable bargain at $390, an eye watering $4.87 per gigabyte. Still the SLC X25-E was selling for almost twice that in a miniscule 64GB capacity. Back then the X25-M was the king of MLC-based SSD storage, delivering the best performance and reliability. If you were lucky enough to own the 160GB model you would have felt like you had all the high-speed storage in the world. Unfortunately it wasn’t long before it became difficult, at least for me anyway, to get by with even a 160GB SSD. For me the next upgrade was the Intel SSD 510 250GB in 2011, which was the first SSD series from Intel that made the move from SATA 3Gb/s to 6GB/s.  Back then games weren’t particularly big. Even so those with half a dozen or more games installed at any one time would still be feeling the pinch. Back in 2011 we had games such as Crysis 2 which required 12.5GB of storage space, Shogun 2: Total War needed 15GB, The Witcher 2 weighed in at around 20GB with the DLC while Battlefield 3 required 20GB for the up to date base install. The alternative has always been to install the less demanding games and applications on a larger mechanical hard drive, along with multi-media content such as movies or music. Thankfully over the years SSD’s have become bigger and more affordable. Late 2012 it was time to upgrade again and the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB could be had for less than the $600, less than 4x the cost per gigabyte of my then 3 year old Intel X25-M 80GB. Today we use 1TB Crucial MX200 SSD’s in our test systems and at $365, or $0.36 per gigabyte, it is hard to believe the prices many of us were paying just a few years ago. Naturally you might think there isn’t much need for a consumer grade SSD to exceed the 1TB barrier at the moment, and for the most part there isn’t. That said there are numerous reasons why someone might need more than 1TB of storage in a single 2.5” device. Recently I built a compact gaming system that only had room for a single 2.5” drive and since I didn’t want any mechanical storage in the system, a large 2.5” SSD would have been ideal.  However looking beyond 1TB there aren’t many options, certainly none that are consumer friendly. The Intel DC S3610 1.2TB costs $1190 for example, while the 1.6GB model is fetching $1590. Recently however Samsung decided to come to the rescue by creating 2TB versions of their famed 850 Pro and 850 Evo series, and today we have the 850 Evo 2TB on hand. Priced at $800 on the dot, the 850 Evo 2TB obviously isn’t cheap, though that works out to be just $0.40 per gigabyte, which isn’t bad and not a huge premium over the $0.36 you can expect to pay for the 1TB models. So we know the price, but what does the performance look like? Is the 2TB model faster, slower or just what we have come to expect from the 850 Evo series? Well let’s find out… |
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