The 850 EVO range of SSDs from Samsung has proved to be very popular among enthusiasts and system builders since they were launched late last year. They're the first generation of drives to use the coveted 32-layer 3D V-NAND technology, and when paired with Samsung’s own TurboWrite technology, the benchmark results are well beyond the average.
The mSATA range of 850 EVO drives are slowly being replaced by newer M.2 ones, but they’re still available and going strong. With capacities starting at 120GB (which we have on test here) and rising to 250GB, 500GB and a whopping 1TB, the popularity of this drive hasn’t diminished quite as quickly as the pundits originally expected.
This 120GB EVO uses the Samsung dual-core MGX NAND controller, along with the aforementioned 32-layer TLC 3D V-NAND. Aside from that, you can expect support for TRIM, S.M.A.R.T., Auto Garbage Collection, shock resistance, AES 256-bit encryption and reliability rated to an impressive 1.5 million hours. Interestingly, Samsung has also included a 512MB LPDDR3 SDRAM bank of memory on the drive: quite a large cache for just 120GBs of storage.
With all this talk of 3D V-NAND and bigger than average cache, we expected to see some impressive numbers for our ATTO benchmark. As it happens, it wasn’t quite as good as we expected.
The 8192KB read test scored 552MB/s and the same file size write scored 533MB/s. Although both great numbers, they were less than the Kingston mSATA drive of the same capacity.
The 4KB values, though, picked up a bit, with 350MB/s read and 302MB/s write, both of which are the fastest smaller file size transfers we’ve seen so far – nearly double that of the Crucial mSATA drive.
Our real-world boot test to the Windows 10 desktop rocketed through in a blistering six seconds. We’re guessing that the smaller file size speeds helped to achieve that score.
Other than the ATTO benchmark and time the boot, the Samsung 120GB 850 EVO performs as well as the other mSATA drives on test. 120GB is enough for the main system files and perhaps a game or two, but you’ll soon need more storage if you’re planning on putting this into a gaming laptop or small media centre with lots of apps and so on installed.
It begs the question, then, of whether the Kingston 120GB mSATA model we looked at earlier is a better investment compared to this Samsung mSATA drive. Certainly the Kingston model is cheaper, and its bigger file size speeds are a tad better (by mere megabytes per second, mind you). But the Samsung mSATA does feel a little snappier, and the better speed at smaller file sizes makes a difference for most home users, plus it only costs around £56.
Either way, it’s something to ponder on. For the time being, though, we’re quite pleased with the performance and price of the Samsung 120GB 850 EVO mSATA.