Update 7/8/14 12:34 p.m.: Samsung just informed us that the prices on three of its four 850 Pro SSDs have dropped. The 256GB version now costs $199.99, the 512GB model can be had for $399.99, and the 1TB variant will now run you $699.99. For each of those drives, that’s a $30 price drop. The 128GB model is still priced at $129.99.
Original story
Samsung just announced that it is launching a brand new lineup of SSDs.
Dubbed the 850 Pro, these drives are powered by the company’s 3D V-NAND tech. According to Samsung, V-NAND “features a proprietary vertical cell structure and represents a breakthrough in overcoming the density limit currently facing planar NAND architecture used in conventional flash memory, yielding significant speed, endurance and energy efficiency improvements.”
Samsung claims that its new 850 Pro drives will shuttle data at blazing rates, which doesn’t surprise us one bit. The company says these new SSDs will reach read speeds of up to 550MB/s, and write speeds of up to 520MB/s. For what it’s worth, according to this page, the Samsung 840 Pro has the same write speed, but is 10MB/s slower on the read speed front (540MB/s).
From an aesthetic standpoint, Samsung didn’t do much, if anything, to switch things up with the 850 Pro’s exterior. In fact, it looks identical to the 840 Pro, right down to the orange square underneath the logo, along the side of the drive’s top panel.
The Samsung 850 Pro will come in one of four storage varieties. The entry level version packs 128GB, and costs $129.99. The next step up is the 256GB model for $229.99. From there, Samsung doubles the storage to 512GB, and attaches a $429.99 asking price to the drive. Finally, there’s the 1TB version, which will run you a whopping $729.99.
Though Samsung hasn’t provided us with an exact release date for their new 850 Pro drives, we have been told that they should be released sometime later this month. Once we get more precise release date information, we will update this article accordingly.
