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The 850 PRO comes in a small black box. While there aren't a lot of details on the front, the back of the box lists many of the drive's features as well as its specifications. Inside, you'll find the SSD, warranty statement, installation guide and a couple of "Samsung SSD Activated" stickers for your computer's case. According to Newegg, the drive is also supposed to come with a software and manual CD but for whatever reason, our drive did not come with one. Nevertheless, Samsung's SSD Magician and Data Migration software can be downloaded from their website.
Physical Features:
Like Samsung's previous SSDs, the 850 PRO is very well constructed. The drive's outer casing is made entirely out of aluminum and is very strong and lightweight. The SSD 850 PRO also shares the same black color scheme found on the SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. However, instead of an orange square, the one on the 850 PRO is red.
Upon opening the case, I was a bit surprised to see how small the 850 PRO's PCB was. Instead of using a regular size PCB, Samsung has placed a 1.8" form factor PCB inside of a 2.5" case.
Like the 840 EVO, the 840 PRO uses Samsung's own S4LN045X01-8030 controller. Developed entirely in house, this proprietary, triple-core MEX controller excels at multi-tasking. Based on an ARM Cortex R4 (400MHz) controller, its three CPU cores can execute multiple instructions such as reading data, writing data and optimization.
For the 256GB version of the 850 PRO, Samsung used their own 32-layer 3D V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 64GB K9HQGY8S5M chips on either side of the PCB. The drive also has a single 512GB K4P4G324EQ-FGC2 LPDDR2 DRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
