A power play for ultrathin PCs
Samsung's been on a roll with releasing solid state drives that offer high performance at comparatively reasonable price points. One of those drive series is the 850 Evo, which Samsung is now offering in M.2 and mSATA form factors. They're about one-tenth the weight of a traditional 2.5-inch SSD, and of course smaller, making them ideal candidates for high performing ultrathin systems.
The drives also feature Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology. By stacking 32 cell layers vertically on top of each other, Samsung is able to achieve a greater density and better performance with a smaller footprint compared to trying to continually decrease cell dimensions to fit onto a fixed horizontal space. This is the direction SSDs are going, as Micron and Intel recently announced the availability of 3D NAND flash as well.
Samsung is offering its 850 Evo mSATA drives in 1TB, 500GB, 250GB, and 120GB capacities with same read and write speeds as their 2.5-inch equivalents (up to 540MB/s read and up to 520MB/s write). The M.2 versions come in 500GB, 250GB, and 120GB capacities rated to read and write data at up to 540MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively.
Also on the topic of performance, the 500GB and 1TB 850 Evo drives use Samsung's TurboWrite technology to achieve random write speeds of up to 88,000 IOPS and random read speeds of up to 97,000 IOPS, which translates into high performance for large data transfers and complex multi-tasking operations.
Samsung didn't say how much the drives will cost.
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