Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SSD Review

This M.2 SATA SSD is small, fast and worth your money. I’ll start off by clarifying something – while this IS an M.2 SSD, it still uses the SATA controller. That means the drive only runs at 6GB/s max, not the much loved 10GB/s that M.2 is known for. This, as far as I’m aware is due to the design of the circuit as they would need to fully redesign the drive – something that will probably happen some time next year.

Now, onto the review. This drive is crazy small for the capacity. Of course we are getting smaller and smaller flash storage components, although this pretty crazy. You can get 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities for the M.2 option, but if you head for the mSATA version you can get 1TB as well, which is insane. While we are talking about the capacities, I’ll meniton that the price of the mSATA and M.2 drives are all around 5% cheaper than their 2.5″ desktop/laptop alternative!

Now, as far as I’m aware, this drive comes with a 5 year warranty, not the 3 year that is on the box – Samsung’s review boxes haven’t been right for around 3 years now… The drive is the 80mm variant which is the longest M.2 drive available, but by the looks of it, it doesn’t need to be as the chips don’t cover the back of the PCB, so there is room for more chips.