The Latest High-Capacity M.2: The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD, Reviewed
by Billy Tallis on February 14, 2018 1:40 PM ESTAnandTech 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.
The Samsung 860 EVO 2TB matches the performance of the 4TB 860 PRO. Both of the new generation drives offer small improvements to the average data rate on The Destroyer—enough to secure Samsung's position at the top of the SATA SSD market, but not enough for 850 PRO or EVO owners to have reason to upgrade.
The 860 EVO provides small improvements to both average and 99th percentile latency. The SanDisk Ultra 3D keeps Samsung's drives from being the clear winners by this metric.
The generational improvements from the 860 EVO are similar for both average read and average write latency. The SanDisk Ultra 3D has a clear advantage for average write latency, but otherwise the current-generation drives with 64L 3D NAND have very similar latency.
The 860 EVO improves both 99th percentile read and write latency, and by a larger amount than average latencies improved.
The power consumption of the 860 EVO is much lower than the 850 EVO and is competitive with the latest drives from Crucial and SanDisk, but isn't a match for the 860 PRO. (The 860 EVO's score here is handicapped by the voltage regulation of our SATA to M.2 converter, and the 1TB Crucial and SanDisk drives have less memory to be powering during the test.)
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DanNeely - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
Did you do the performance tests via the sata-m2 adapter too? If so will you be re-running them in PCIe mode next?JanW1 - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
This is a M.2 SATA drive, no point in trying to run tests in PCIe mode.Flunk - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
I can already tell you the results, they're all 0.Drazick - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
M.2 is perfect for Laptop's.Why don't we see U.2 for Desktop's?
It will mitigate most throttling issues.
Not to say simplify the Mother Boards.
CheapSushi - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
There are U.2 for desktops....But U.2 is NVMe/PCIe based. This is SATA/AHCI. You can turn a mini-SAS port and I think U.2 (correct me if wrong) into a quad SATA port with appropriate cable. Nothing wrong with SATA/AHCI for a bulk storage drive. Unless you'e assuming everyone just wants ONE drive for the entire system.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
In a system you would want to use the U.2 port in, there is a decent probability that a second drive will be desired if not already present. Like you said, "Nothing wrong with SATA/AHCI for a bulk storage drive". For systems that you can rule out a bulk storage drive, there is a high probability that nVME needs will be served by M.2 rather than U.2.Though some can tell a difference, it is not even certain that most perceive the performance benefit moving from a fast SATA SSD to an nVME SSD for a primary disk due to how current operating systems handle the storage subsystem.
Bulat Ziganshin - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
3dnews.ru testing shown that 512 GB model sometimes is slower than 850EVO, due to lower parallelism. It's why Samsung sent you 2TB model for tests insteadyankeeDDL - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
Why was the 960 EVO/PRO not included?SpaceRanger - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
Because this is a SATA drive, not an NVME drive.Flunk - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
As such they utterly destroy this.