Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB Solid State Drive

Samsung is also one of the world's leaders in advanced memory technology. Last fall, the company began mass producing the industry’s first three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory. To break through the scaling limit for existing NAND flash technology, 3D V-NAND utilizes Samsung’s proprietary vertical cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and vertical interconnect process technology to link the 3D cell array. By applying both of these technologies, Samsung’s 3D V-NAND offers anywhere from two to ten times the reliability and twice the write performance of conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory.

One of the first consumer-oriented products to take advantage of 3D V-NAND is Samsung's new 850 PRO SSD. First unveiled at the 2014 Samsung SSD Global Summit in Seoul, the 850 PRO is ideal for use in high-end PCs and workstations. The drive is powered by Samsung's own 3-core MEX controller and is available with up to 1TB of their second generation, 32-layer 3D V-NAND flash. The 850 PRO also supports Device Sleep (DEVSLP) for lower power consumption as well as self-encrypting drive (SED) technology that is TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 compliant. To top it all off, it supports Samsung's RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) technology. By using free PC memory as a cache, RAPID can push the performance of the SSD beyond the limits of the current SATA specification.

The 850 PRO is available in a wide range of capacities from 128GB up to a massive 1TB. For this review, Samsung sent us the 256GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 100,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS.