Samsung SSD 850 Series. EVO vs PRO ? Thoughts?

After reading the differences between the two, it seems it's only a slight advantage to send money on the PRO model. I've also seen the benchmarks, and it's still fairly similar. I'm specifically

If you've faced the same dilemma, which one did you end up purchasing and for what reason?

I have the PRO model. The drive has performed as advertised thus far. The concern I had when purchasing was the issue of wear on flash. The drive is backed up regularly, but the physics of flash easily pushed me to the PRO model because of the longer warranty.

Hope this helps,

110yd

I don't think you can go wrong with either one. I chose the PRO because I picked it up at a discount.

I ordered a Samsung SSD 850 Series EVO just because. I guess the pro is 10% faster but it's not like I have a 50 MPX sensor.

For the average PC user I really don't see the increased cost of the Pro being worth it over the Evo. The real world performance will be negligible. The real difference is in the warranty and rated life, but for most users this will be meaningless. For example I have two PC's running 250 GB 840 Evo's, they have been in use for 18 months. Both of these PC's are used daily for gaming, photo and video processing. So far the total bytes written on these drives are 1.22 and 2.05 TB. At these rates I will reach the 40 TB rating in 49.1 and 29.2 years. With SATA Express and M.2 interfaces becoming more mainstream most users will upgrade to faster drives long before approaching the write ratings.

If you are a professional photographer/videograp​her or do high volume processing than the increased cost is justified.

Thanks everyone. Definitely just a hobbyist with an occasional paid job. Sounds like the EVO would do fine and it'll allow me to pick up another SanDisk SD card for the camera too.

The flash chips in the PRO will last longer. It's MLC (two bits per cell) instead of TLC (three bits per cell) which will be a little more reliable - but the EVO is a good drive, very hard wearing. Enterprise drives are SLC, one bit per cell, the most reliable.

I think both are excellent. I've stuck with the EVO though, as I built over 10 desktops for my office. Pro gets excellent reviews as well. I think it's more of a pricing issue.

For ANYONE buying the Samsung Evo 840 850 or Pro SSD's, go and download and run and use the Samsung Magician software:

Details on it:

http://www.samsung.com …tepaper/whitepa​per12.html

Download here:

http://www.samsung.com …ng_Magician_Set​up_v45.zip

You can use it to optimize your drive, download firmware updates, optimize your OS, over provision the drive (def use this - will extend the life of the drive) and you can enable their RAPID technology.

All great a must have software if you run these drives.

I can't wait to snag another one - have my eyes on a 1TB to got with my 500gb 840 EVO!

I have RAPID installed but I don't use RAPID - there are benefits to benchmarks, not really to practical use. It just makes a RAM cache, which windows already does. Firmware updates and such are useful.

I haven't seen any indication that the longer term warranties for SSDs correlate to increased short-term reliability, and as a professional I upgrade drives well within three years.

I know some people are worried about flash endurance which has turned out to mostly be a bogey man kind for quality SSDs. If you are using your system a lot for editing your probably going to upgrade it every few years and if so it really shouldn't be a concern unless you are doing a massive amount of data writes to the SSD.

There have been a few endurance tests showing quality drives last far far beyond manufactures claimed lifespan, here is one that might interest people thinking about buy SSD's. http://techreport.com …n-the-way-to-a-petabyte/3

As for the original question I would buy the Evo vs. the pro, the performance difference for day to day workloads will be minimal and with prices dropping so rapidly on SSD's you are going to be able to upgrade to something much larger for a much better price in 2 years vs. today. The other thing to think of is if you are connecting the drive vs. a standard sata 3 connector used on most hard drives that even the previous generation EVO basically saturated the bandwidth on SATA3 for large file transfers.

Keep in mind as well larger drives typically will have longer flash endurance because they can spread the writes out over a larger amount of flash storage(unless you keep your drive 80%+ full constantly).

I have had my 840 EVO for over a year and it has my Lightroom databases/previews on it while the raw files and jpeg's are stored to a separate disk and in a year I have only written 8TB of data to it, at this rate it will be around 10-15 years before I even hit the manufactures estimated write capacity, and I am certainly more towards the power user of the spectrum vs. an average user.