After more than three years of huge success in the SATA SSD market, the Samsung 850 series is being replaced. The 850 EVO and 850 PRO, which first brought 3D NAND flash memory to the SSD market, are being retired to make way for the new Samsung SSD 860 EVO and 860 PRO. The new 860 series is not as revolutionary as the 850, but it represents the continued evolution of Samsung's SSD technology.
The technological changes brought by the 860 series are not greater than those we have already seen in the 850 series. The NAND flash memory is equipped with Samsung's new 64-layer 3D NAND technology. The entire series is based on the MJX controller and the DRAM used will be LPDDR4. The 4TB capacity makes its appearance in both models but we are not expected to see anything larger according to the company.
Looking at the numbers, we see that the performance does not have a huge increase compared to the 850 and this is because the SATA interface has not received any upgrade. However, we see that the TBW (Terra Bytes Writen) number has balanced since there is a corresponding increase depending on the capacity of the disk. Between the two EVO and PRO models there is a double difference.
The most notable change is the reduction of the PRO's warranty period (compared to the 850pro) from 10 years to 5, meaning that all versions in the 860 series will also have the same warranty. The other big surprise is that there will be mSATA versions of the EVO 860. This means we'll see a new mSATA SSD after a long time, as most of its product lines have abandoned it in favor of M.2 SATA. The EVO 860 will also appear in a 2TB M.2 SATA version.
For several years we saw the Samsung 850 PRO and 850 EVO as the undisputed leaders in the SATA SSD value for money market and beyond. This changed somewhat in 2017 after we saw Intel and Crucial launch very fast SSDs that competed with them, however it is not excluded that the 860 series will be among the best for 2018.
