Even if Samsung’s 800 series of SSDs hasn’t had the best few weeks, the Korean electronics manufacturer is plowing ahead with new ventures regardless. It’s now announced two new drives, which thanks to their use of 3D V-NAND flash memory — which stacks vertically — have capacities up to two terabytes.
This is all part of the new SSD arms race. While bringing the cost down was paramount when 250GB drives were considered monstrous, in today’s market where the gap between per gigabyte pricing between SSDs and HDDs is becoming ever smaller, capacity is where the next war will be fought.
The cost of each drive will still be important of course, which is why Samsung has the 850 Pro and Samsung 850 Evo priced at $1,000 and $850 respectively. However the competition is likely to be fierce, with SanDisk claiming that it plans 16TB SSD solutions as soon as next year.
In the mean time, though, Samsung is looking to rule the roost with affordable, high-capacity solid-state drives. Although there is competition from the likes of Intel and some various PCIe SSD makers, both are vastly more expensive than Samsung’s latest solution. Arguably hybrid SSHD drives are much more cost effective and offer similar capacities, but the performance isn’t likely to be the same.
The new drives will maintain the traditional 2.5-inch form factor and performance will be on par with the rest of the range. Sequential read/write speeds for the Evo are 540MBps and 520MBps respectively, while the Pro is slightly faster, featuring 550MBps and 520MBps.
The Pro also comes with a more enterprise focus, with increased endurance giving it the ability to write up to 300 terabytes before failure is expected. In comparison, the Evo is said to top our at 150 terabytes.
Although still quite expensive for the average consumer, do you like the idea of having a 2TB SSD with traditional SATA III performance?
