Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Samsung 850 PRO - 2TB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-7KE2T0BW)

The fastest hard drive ive ever looked upon.

Ron

Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2015

I bought this hard drive to replace a Western Digital Black for extreme gaming. I play old games and new games, so this review will be detailed. My system setup consists of an i7 4770k CPU, Asus Sabertooth z87 MB, 32 GB G.Skill RAM @ 2400mhz, and of course, the Samsung 850 Pro. My tests will include games, system and programs, music and video, and a benchmark tool.

1. Games - When it comes to gaming, having an SSD dramatically decreased load times for most newer games. Old games are not really affected due to how little data most of them need to load from the hard drive in today's standards. The biggest improvement came with Star Citizen. SC is still in super alpha, so nothing is optimized and load times are outrageous. Were outrageous. It used to take me nearly 2 minutes to load into hangar, now with the 850 pro, its less than 30 seconds. Other games such as Planetside 2, Mad Max, Homeworld etc have also vastly improved loading times. And its not just load times that are improved. In some games such as GTA San Andreas you can move into a new area faster than the hard drive can load things like building textures and pedestrians. The SSD solves this, no more do things just pop into existence beside you. Skyrim also has a bit of this problem too if you use a mod to give you a fast ride. Overall in the gaming department, this is really where the SSD shines to me.

2. System and Software - Windows startup time is also another area that shines brightly with an SSD. Traditional hard drive takes 1 minute or more to boot, sometimes 45 seconds if you got a good drive and a fresh install of windows. With the 850 pro, my fully loaded Windows 10 Pro OS can boot up in 22 seconds. That's with no password and such. 22 seconds from power button to mouse moving on desktop. The system tray icons at the bottom right of the desktop used to take 2 or 3 minutes for all of them to load up after arriving to the desktop, now with the 850 pro they all pop up simultaneously and instantly. My web browser, Firefox, used to take about 2 or 3 seconds to load up after clicking, now before my ear can even register the second click of the mouse, the browser is fully loaded and ready to go. I have also noticed greatly increased performance in Microsoft office programs, especially excel and power point. Then came the real software test. WinRar. As a winrar test i packed up 10 GB of music to test speeds. It took less than a minute to package up (compress) the 10 GB using the Best compression method, where as on a traditional hard drive your looking at 30 to 45 minutes of waiting maybe even more since i used the best method. Unpackaging (decompression) was instantaneous at the click of the mouse. Every thing i do is like a flash of light.

3. Music and Movies - Not much to say here other than transfer speeds are high, but i wouldn't keep music or movies on an SSD, they don't play better or sound better, but they do take up limited space and put wear and tear on the drive. Best to leave them on the traditional hard drive.

4. Benchmark - I have included a screenshot of the benchmarking program i used to test this hard drive. As you can see all test results exceed the specifications of this hard drive. I could to many different tests using many different settings but i stuck with the default and most used one.

Construction - The SSD's construction is very nice. It is very strong and solid, but also very light almost like paper. It is very smooth and slim and should fit nearly anywhere you want to put it. Also the sata and power connectors are stiff and strong.

Software - The samsung magician software that is paired with the hard drive is also very nice. It shows the health and total data written to the hard drive, can change windows options to better suit the SSD and its needs, encryption, the works. The only thing is that Rapid Mode does not work for windows 10 yet but Samsung says they are working hard on it, it has something to do with the new way windows 10 manages memory.

Conclusion - Overall, this is the greatest hard drive Ive ever seen. Its super fast, super strong, has great software, and is backed up by a monster 10 year warranty. I looked forward to many years of extreme gaming with this SSD. I would highly haft to recommend this SSD to everyone. It is a truly great product made by a great company from a great nation. You wont be disappointed with this SSD.

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4 people found this helpful

Building systems since 2003. Best/most dramatic gain in performance I've ever seen.

Frank

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2016

I've been building systems since 2003, and I've seen quite a bit of change in my time. I've seen weird stuff come and go, like Intel's Slot A for the Pentium 2 (and consequentially the last time I bought Intel for myself). Networking has gone from "56k" (which was really 53kbps) to whatever ungodly speed the Cable companies have now. I've seen USB go from being nice to have to become an absolute standard on its third revision and floppys go from being standard to being dead as a door nail. Ive seen memory go from regular Synchronous Dynamic Memory running at 100 Mhz, then to to 133 Mhz to Dual Data Rate (which was a huge performance gain in and of itself) onward to DDR3. The last real bottleneck in PC performance that hardware can address by itself is storage, and aside from a faster version of the storage interface standard, an SSD is as good as it gets. Samsung makes some of the most highly regarded controllers for enterprise and datacenter grade SSDs. Their consumer drives benefit from their expertise,

I have an expensive, fairly high performance system that I use for tasks related to work, for my master's degree program and for gaming. Going from a regular spinning HDD to an SSD as my system disk has resulted in one of the largest performance gains that I have ever seen. My only complaint is that the 1 TB version was just too expensive.

However, when compared to the "regular" Samsung EVO 850, do youself a favor and shell out the extra 25 to 30 dollars for the pro, the speeds are just that much better for writes and reads, plus that 10 year warranty. Samsung apparently has one of these drives in the lab, they've subjected it to 8 TB writes, formats and reads every day for the past 3 years. It still hasn't failed. If you've been waiting for NAND technology to mature before taking the plunge, I would say that its ready to go primetime now with V-NAND.

Better controller and better NAND arrays. Just make sure Windows and your programs will fit on the SSD with some room to install new stuff with, and you're good to go to clone your original hard drive onto the SSD. Its easy and you'll wonder why you hadn't done it sooner the first time Windows snaps on and logs you in as fast as you can type
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My Specs:
Mainboard Model: MSI MS-7640
CPU: AMD FX-8350 (Piledriver/Vishera, OR-C0 (Orochi))
4000 MHz (20.00x200.0) @ 1400 MHz (7.00x200.0)
Motherboard: MSI 990FXA-GD65 (MS-7640)
Chipset: AMD 990FX (RD990) + SB920/SB950
Memory: 32768 MBytes @ 666 MHz, 9.0-9-9-24
- 8192 MB PC12800 DDR3 SDRAM - Corsair CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10
- 8192 MB PC12800 DDR3 SDRAM - Corsair CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10
- 8192 MB PC12800 DDR3 SDRAM - Corsair CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10
- 8192 MB PC12800 DDR3 SDRAM - Corsair CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10
Graphics: XFX Radeon R9 270X
ATI/AMD Radeon R9 270X, 2048 MB GDDR5 SDRAM
Drive: Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB, 500.1 GB, Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 6Gb/s
Drive: ST1000DM003-1ER162, 976.8 GB, Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 6Gb/s
Sound: ATI/AMD SB800/Hudson-1 - High Definition Audio Controller
Sound: ATI/AMD Verde/Heathrow/Chelsea - High Definition Audio Controller
Network: RealTek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Education Build 14361

Reliable drive with good performance.

Jeremy

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2024

Installed a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro in a Windows desktop system that runs 24/7 in March 2016. Replaced it as preventive maintenance in February 2024. Never had any problems with it. Fast, reliable, long lasting. Can't ask for more.

Awesome - Combined Desktop bootup and Video Project losd time cut from 30 minutes to 4 minutes :-)

Ti C.

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2015

I LOVE THIS Samsung 850 Pro! I already had a great computer... An ASUS Desktop i7, Windows 8.1, 32Gb Ram, 3Tb hard drive, Nvidia 660 something video card, and it worked great for almost everything... But I'm working on a long (over 2 hour) video project in Camtasia and Camtasia is only a 32-bit program and isn't generally designed for long videos, but my project about my www.FutureVisioning.com Hypnotherapy and Healing work grew over time way beyond what I thought it would be, so there was no way to switch to another program, and when Camtasia would have a problem and freeze or crash, it would take 3 to 4 minutes to reboot my computer, 3 minutes to reboot Camtasia and 20 minutes to load my project with my hard drive being used 100% of the time for the full 20 minutes... So every problem, crash or reboot wasted a frustrating half hour. I could see that the bottleneck was my hard drive loading into memory so I researched a lot about SSD's and the Samsung seems to be consistently the fastest and most reliable, especially with their new stacked technology it seemed the best performance and price wise, and I decided to get this Samsung 850 Pro 256 to speed up the project loading time, and I hoped that it would help with my boot up and program loading time as well.

AND… OMG! :-) This is the face of a happy camper :-).

The Samsung 850 came in 2 days with Prime, it was easy to install and took only about a half hour, (I got the cradle and the cable separately). The cloning software worked perfectly! I was thrilled… and now my desktop comes up in about 45 seconds and the background processes are finished about 15 seconds later.( I have read of some people booting in 15 to 20 seconds and i can't figure out how they do that but i am so happy now I really don't care! My Camtasia program opens in about 10 seconds, and my 2 hour 40 minute project with hundreds of edits opens to begin work in 2 minutes and has fully loaded all sound and video files on the timeline in 3 minutes! and rendering my project out to an mp4 seems faster as well. I expect that when Camtasia gets around to making a 64 bit version everything will take another leap in loading and processing time. I am using Adobe Premier Pro now to color correct my videos and I may use it for editing next time because it is 64 bit and has far more bells and whistles, like comlete color correction capabilities and in it I can scroll through at high speed and see every high speed frame and hear high speed audio. I don't know if I could have done this without the Samsung but it is bery cool to do that now.

I don't even mind if Camtasia crashes now (which it doesn't seem to do as often) because it saves the last version reliably and it is so fun to use the stopwatch in my phone to see how fast everything comes back to life. Outlook opens faster, maybe 20 seconds, Word is almost instant, Firefox is also almost instant, I can have many programs open at once, and play many videos all at the same time. (I am not sure what the practical value playing many videos at once is because I can't follow them all, but it is still fun to do!) This is one of the most fun and satisfying purchases I have ever made! Thank you Amazon and Samsung!

One person found this helpful

Good speed boost - but some serious gotchas

The Headhunter

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2016

I've never used an SSD before so had no idea what to expect. All in all, I like my 850 Pro, but there are some very serious gotchas. I hope my review helps out some other users before they encounter the gotchas I did.

Some of the reviews are a bit over the top about how much this will speed up your computer -- but it does speed it up very significantly. However, it's not as dramatic as some suggest. I set up my new 850 Pro on a beefy Windows tower that has a separate HD for the operating system (Win7 Ultimate) and programs. I cloned the C drive to the SSD using the Samsung software included with the SSD, using an Anker SATA3-to-USB 3.0 cable and adapter. There is no need to format the SSD before you clone with this software -- it just works.

My pc boots faster and Windows 7 comes up very quickly. So do all my applications that run off my C drive. What's most noticeable is how fast my browser (Firefox) loads.

What's troubling, however, is that the Samsung migration software runs under Windows, so it doesn't really clone your HD (if what you're cloning is your OS drive) -- lots of files are omitted because Windows is running. And that's where I wound up with a huge problem that did not surface for several days.

1. The migration process did not copy my Restore Points, and -- worse -- it turned System Restore OFF without any notification. I should have checked this but didn't. So for days my automated daily System Restore never happened. Lesson: If you substitute this SSD for your C drive, after you clone and install the SSD as your C, go to System Restore and make sure you've got it turned on.

FAR WORSE: The cloning process DELETED all my saved Restore Points. Not a good thing.

2. I use Acronis True Image to back up my drives. (Some people hate Acronis. I survive it. The interface leaves a lot to be desired, but it works. I've never really had a problem with it, and I don't think the problems I'm about to describe are due to Acronis.) Just like the Samsung cloning process messed up my System Restore settings (and lost my Restore Points), it totally gummed up my C drive backup settings.

For days, the C backup process just wasn't happening. My fault again for not checking this after installing the SSD. One evening, Acronis tried to back up my C drive -- as apparently it had been trying all week-- but this time I noticed that it failed. So I tried to run the backup manually. This crashed my system and apparently corrupted the SSD. I could no longer boot from the SSD. Having saved my original HD with Win7 and my applications on it, I merely swapped and was back up and running -- though I'd lost some changes that I'd made to my C drive in the meantime. This failure wasted hours of my time.

After some research on the Acronis site, I learned that an OS drive is assigned a hex ID -- and the Samsung migration software does not clone that. (Sorry - I'm not up on all the details about this. My description of the problem is lightweight.) The net is, Acronis couldn't "find" one of the SSD's partitions so the backup kept failing. Technically, this was not Samsung's fault -- I reconfigured the Acronis backup settings for the C drive and now the SSD is running fine and C backups are done as they should be.

BUT, this problem killed my SSD in action and I had to start again from scratch.

I'm going into all this detail because I think Samsung is not up front about the cloning process. You don't get a clone of your C drive. Samsung's migration utility does warn that any "open" files will not be migrated -- but let's face it, one of the most common uses for an SSD has got to be the C drive. And we all know that when you clone a C drive, it's best done outside Windows -- not with Windows running. Not being told something as obvious as that my Restore Points and settings will be deleted is a serious failure. Not being warned that any pre-set backups for the C drive need to be re-configured is a serious failure. When we use the word "clone" we expect an exact copy. You don't get an exact, working copy of your C drive. So, heads up.

Bottom line: I really like the performance boost I get with the 850 Pro. I didn't like having to go through the hassle of learning about the cloning problem after the SSD was corrupted. We'll see if any other unexpected and undocumented problems crop up. In the meantime, I'm saving my original C hard drive in case the SSD goes south for some other unexpected reason.

If anyone has advice or insights about any of this, I'd love to hear it. Like I said -- I'm not an IT pro. But I'm not stupid. I learn as I go, and I think Samsung owes its customers a more detailed, thoughtful caution about how the cloning process works and doesn't work.

I have not yet used the "Magician" optimizing software Samsung includes. Frankly, I'm worried about how it works -- and about what else Samsung doesn't tell us. Would love any input on that as well, as I'd like to optimize the SSD if it's not risky.

Would I buy this SSD again and recommend it? Yes. But beware of these gotchas.

3 people found this helpful

The Fastest Samsung Drive I've Yet Used

Ray

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2016

What you want to know is this: is this SSD faster than the 850 EVO? When dealing with SSD's, does any appreciable difference in speed occur, since they are all so fast, anyway? The fact is this: I've been using Samsung SSD's of varying varieties for years, and when I recently replaced my Samsung 840EVO with this one (on my boot drive), the speed notice WAS undeniably different. Yes, I still has those couple of seconds of booting time after the POST routine finished, but instead of programs loading, they almost felt like they were POPPING, this thing is so fast. For example, when I log into Windows 10, I would get that slight lag time as the desktop loaded. Now, admittedly, we are dealing with very small time differences here, because my 840 IS fast. But when I put this thing in, when I logged in, the screen just POPPED open, almost like there was no load time. None of this is a scientific description, but it is the absolute experience I've had with this new type of memory that Samsung is using in the 850 PRO. It is still pretty pricey, so I've gone with the 250Gb version for my boot disk, and then run my other, larger Samsung 840's and traditional drives as secondary drives. And it is true that I am using this in a system that I built myself with only superior parts (motherboard, RAM, video, etc.), but there is absolutely no question to the answer you are looking for if you are investigating this drive: YES, it IS faster than the previous drives that Samsung put out (and still sells).

Is it worth the price? Hard to say. First, is what type of computer user are you? What types of programs do you typically run? And what type of system do you have? For example, if the bottleneck is in another part of the system, you may not get the most bang for your buck by spending the extra on this PRO version. But if you have a modern, well-specified computer, you will notice a speed difference. I certainly did. And now comes the wait until the 850 PRO prices come down, because what you really want is something like this, but in 4Tb or larger. It will be a few years before we see such storage, and at reasonable prices, but this drive clearly shows it is coming. For now, if you are dealing with a desktop, consider my strategy of using it as the boot disk with all your programs installed, and other, less expensive drives for storage. If this is for a laptop, you have to ask yourself if your laptop is new enough and powerful enough (RAM, processor, video system, etc.) to warrant the extra expense. All SSD drives are fast, and generally, scream past the traditional spin platter drives we all grew up with. But there IS a difference in how the memory in an SSD is constructed (read the Samsung material here on Amazon to understand the difference in this particular type of configuration), and then, of course, there is the often-overlooked factor of the controller attached to the disk, which also has an impact on speed.

Of all the Samsung drives I've purchased, this is the best, and fastest. Its a superb drive that is a window into the future of SSD drives. The holidays are coming soon, so you might watch it for temporary price drops. I cannot justify (or afford) the price of these in their largest size, but for a boot drive of 250Gb, I get most all the benefits for just a little over $100. This is a five-star product.

4 people found this helpful

Phil Stracchino (Technical Thug)

Possibly the first mass storage device that you will never wear out

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2015

Let's get this straight right up front: How confident is Samsung that this SSD drive will go the distance? Confident enough that they put a ten year warranty on it. If you've ever been concerned that an SSD might not last as long as a mechanical disk, stop worrying now. This one will outlast any consumer mechanical drive ever sold, while delivering a sustained transfer rate that will set your eyebrows on fire. You will not believe how fast your computer boots the first time you boot it off this drive.

Installation is plug-and-play. Samsung provides any required drivers, and a Magician utility that properly tunes Windows to work best with your SSD. If you're using it on Linux, just set your kernel elevator algorithm to NOOP. (If that was Greek to you, don't worry about it; if you didn't understand it, you don't need to know it.)

Why the Samsung 850 series? Well, you need to understand a few things about flash memory. The short version is, to make flash RAM cheaper and higher-capacity, you need to pack pack more and more storage onto each chip. To pack more and more memory cells onto a chip, you have to make the individual memory cells smaller and smaller. But when you make NAND flash RAM cells smaller, two things happen — they wear out more quickly, and they become more likely to make errors. Samsung's breakthrough was to figure out a way to build flash RAM cells in stacked layers, so that they could stack 32 cells on top of each other, hugely increasing how much memory they can put on a chip while using larger, more stable memory cells. That's why this drive carries a ten-year warranty. Samsung's latest designs use 48 layers of cells, and they haven't hit a limit yet.

Why an SSD at all, when they're more expensive than mechanical disks?

Well, LOTS of reasons. They start with the following:
— SSDs are much faster than mechanical disks. In particular, they have no spin-up time or seek time - they respond instantly.
— SSDs have no moving parts, therefore they have no mechanical wear.
— This also makes them completely silent.
— SSDs are to all practical purposes shockproof. An SSD will survive, unscathed, a drop that will smash your laptop to pieces.
— SSDs draw less power, and produce less waste heat, than mechanical disks.

Spinning rust is the past. Solid state storage is the future. You like the future... don't you? The future is COOL.

3 people found this helpful

Oswaldo Diaz

La velocidad.

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2024

Bueno, hasta hoy no e
tenido problemas en mi
computer, me gusta la
velocidad.

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Brandon Cassata

Absolutely worth the price.

Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2017

After being a fairly avid PC gamer for the better part of the past 10+ years, I decided it was time to give my system a long overdue performance upgrade. Decided that the prices were finally reasonable enough to give one a shot. See what all the hype was about. I've seen videos online and posts talking about how quick they are, how reliable they are, and tried to do as much research as I could on the drawbacks - namely the limited write cycles, and how to best deal with them.

If the rating wasn't enough foreshadowing for how this experience went, let me just say this: Everything you've heard is absolutely true. It's one thing seeing a video showing Windows booting up in a fraction of the time it used to. It's another thing entirely to see your system, which probably takes upwards of 30 seconds on a standard HDD to start up, boot up from a cold boot in less than 10. It's absolutely mind boggling.

Now to the meat of the review though. First and foremost, Windows 10 supports solid state drives beautifully. It even goes as far as to automatically disable disk fragmentation (which you NEVER want to do on an SSD) and instead offers "optimization" which routinely trims the drive to keep it running quickly. Being my first and only SSD, I reinstalled Windows 10 on the drive so I could get the absolute best performance I could from it, and from start to finish the process was ridiculously fast. The normal dread of constant reboots when reinstalling all your software is absolutely gone. Knowing you can restart and be back at your desktop in under 15 seconds is just beautiful.

Second, if and when you install the Magician Software, if this is your first SSD, it's important to realize that your number of writes is going to surge in the beginning. You just got done installing a whole operating system. You're installing software, transferring some of your most used files to the drive, etc. Don't be too alarmed if you check it and you see it's suddenly a quarter of a terabyte high when it seems like you haven't even begun to use it yet. Your most concentrated usage of the drive is going to be that early bit, so take that number with a grain of salt.

Third, I waited to write this review primarily because it's been in my experience when reading reviews that drives especially - be it hard disk or solid state, that are going to fail, tend to have a tendency to fail within a month or two after purchase. Once you're past that, you're usually out of the woods and typically good for the long haul. So before making any premature judgement, I waited and here I am. Solid 5/5 review.

Only issue I'm having is entirely on me, which is that after having experienced the speed, I suddenly want to use it for everything and when you're sharing the drive with an operating system and games like The Witcher 3 are alone as large is 46GB, that's simply not possible with a 256GB drive. So if you're on the fence, it's definitely a safe size to experiment with. But if you know what you're getting, I'd absolutely recommend a larger storage capacity.

5 people found this helpful