Samsung 860 Evo

I reviewed the best consumer drive available, the Samsung NVMe. Most people can't afford an NVMe drive or don't have the available high speed M.2 slots to use one.

Samsung has dominated the solid state drive (SSD) market for years. They have the highest performance and reasonable pricing.

Rated at 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write, these drives will nearly max out the Sata 3 connection on your motherboard. The only way to get a faster drive is to use the Pro version, PCI-E SSD or NVMe drive. The Pro version generally isn't worth the premium price for a small improvement in performance.

Samsung SSD drives come with a 5 year warranty, which is very generous and helps convince users to switch to SSD storage as the write wear rates have improved dramatically. SSD drives by nature wear out over time, you can only write to memory so many times before it no long is reliable. Early drives this was a big concern, modern drives it isn't an issue, even under heavy usage.

The Samsung 860 model has increased the write endurance 800% over the Samsung 850 model. This is a huge improvement in just a short time.

I don't recommend getting the 250GB/500GB models are they are much slower and do not run at 550MB/s nor do they have a larger Turbo Write Cache. The 1TB is the best starting point for the Samsung EVO 860.

You can find the 1TB SSD 860 EVO on Amazon for $178 shipped.

_{All images are from Amazon product page}