Samsung 850 EVO

The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB is a big, lightweight SATA SSD for older systems and backup duty. It's slow by modern standards, landing in the 29th percentile for speed, and the 300 TBW endurance is underwhelming. At $900 to $949, it only makes sense if you're stuck with a 2.5-inch bay and need 4TB of solid state storage.

Sequential speeds top out at 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write, which is about as fast as SATA III physically allows. Random performance sits at 98K read IOPS and 90K write IOPS, which lands it in the middle of the pack for SATA drives but well behind any modern NVMe drive. The 300 TBW endurance rating is a weak spot, putting it in the 30th percentile. For a 4TB drive, that's not a ton of write headroom if you're hammering it daily. The DRAM cache helps keep things snappy in short bursts, and the TLC NAND with Samsung's V-NAND tech has proven reliable over the years. Just don't expect it to feel fast if you've been spoiled by a Gen 4 NVMe boot drive.

Stacked against the Western Digital Black SN850X, Micron T710, Seagate FireCuda 530R, Kingston Fury Renegade, and SanDisk Optimus GX PRO 8100, the 850 EVO looks like it showed up to a drag race on a bicycle. All of those competitors are PCIe Gen 4 NVMe drives with speeds measured in thousands of MB/s, not hundreds. The 850 EVO's only real advantage is its 2.5-inch SATA form factor, which those drives don't offer. If your machine has an M.2 slot, any of those competitors will run circles around this drive for similar or less money. The 850 EVO wins only in the "fits in my old laptop" category.

At $900 to $949 USD, this is a tough sell. You're paying a premium for the 4TB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor, but you're getting SATA speeds and middling endurance. For the same money, you could grab a 4TB NVMe drive that's five to ten times faster, assuming your system has an M.2 slot. The value proposition only makes sense if you're stuck with a single 2.5-inch bay and absolutely need 4TB of solid state storage. Otherwise, a 4TB HDD costs a fraction of this and works fine for backups.

The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB is a relic that refuses to die, and honestly, we respect that. It's a 2.5-inch SATA drive in a world gone NVMe crazy, but it still packs a massive 4TB into a tiny, lightweight shell. If you've got an older laptop with a single drive bay or need a big, cheap-ish backup drive that won't rattle around, this thing still makes a case for itself.

But let's be real about the numbers. 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write was great in 2015. Today, that puts it in the 29th percentile for speed in our database. It's not going to win any races against modern PCIe Gen 4 drives, but for everyday computing and bulk storage, it gets the job done without complaining.

Skip this if you have an M.2 slot available. A 4TB NVMe drive will cost about the same and deliver five to ten times the speed. Also skip it if you're just backing up files and don't need solid state durability, a 4TB HDD costs a fraction of the price and works fine for that. And if you're planning to write tons of data daily, the 300 TBW endurance rating will run out faster than you'd like.

Buy this if you have an older laptop with a single 2.5-inch drive bay and you need maximum capacity without moving parts. It's also a decent pick for external backup enclosures where speed doesn't matter much. Everyone else should look at NVMe drives, which offer dramatically better performance for the same or less money. The 850 EVO is a niche product in 2024, but it fills that niche well enough.