Samsung 850 EVO mSATA and M.2

Conclusion

The Samsung 850 EVO is a great drive. It delivers excellent performance across various workloads. It does really well in a typical desktop workloads thanks to the TurboWrite and RAPID. The drive is lagging behind a little at higher queue depth but then given to its target market, it is doubtful that it would matter much.

We like a lot about the 850 EVO. The drive is packed with features, comes with a an excellent software utilities and the five year warranty. Naturally, we are glad to see Samsung releases the 850 EVO with the mSATA and the M.2 interface. There are two major features that sets the 850 EVO apart is the support for the Deep Sleep and the up to date security encryption support for TCG/Opal V2.0 and IEEE1667 security. These features are essential for the mSATA and M.2 drive since they are targeted toward portable devices where battery life and security are critical. To make the drives even more attractive, Samsung not only is able to deliver the same storage option capacity of the 2.5” drive at reduced footprint, it is also cut down the price of the drives, making the M.2 and the mSATA 850 EVO drives even more attractive.

While the mSATA is dying, we are glad to see Samsung continues to support existing customers. There are not many options available for 1TB of storage space with mSATA interface. In fact, Samsung’s own 840 EVO seems to be the only option available until now. The 850 EVO is definitely the worthy successor to the 840 EVO and it would be a great choice for anyone looking to upgrade their system to 1TB of storage where not only you get tons of space but up to date features as well.

The future for mobile storage lies on M.2 and it’s good to see Samsung is moving quickly with the 850 EVO M.2. At the moment, Samsung only has 500GB available with M.2 interface. We would love to see larger capacities available as an option. Also, we would love to see NVMe support, something that we would have to wait for the next generation M.2 drives from Samsung. In the meantime, the 850 EVO M.2 is still a very good purchase with its price and features.