Samsung 850 Pro or 850 Evo?

[Heis]

Currently debating whether to get an 850 512GB Pro or an 850 500GB Evo.

What are the differences between these two SSD's? Is the Pro faster than the Evo? Is the Pro better quality? Does the pro run hotter than the Evo?

I'm more curious about the temps, whether or not the Pro runs hotter than the Evo.
Thank you in advance​

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Pro is faster and has a better projected lifetime (TBs written.) Probably runs a bit hotter.

EVO is fine for most uses, tbh. If you're building a system and on a budget, you're better off with the EVO and a faster CPU/GPU instead.

 

[Coup27]

The main differentiator is endurance. The Pro uses MLC NAND which is more durable (aka, it can be written to more times) than TLC NAND used in the EVO. Unless you run a write intensive workload it's highly unlikely you will need MLC NAND.

Outside of benchmarks you won't notice the difference between the two. I have an 850 EVO in my work and home PC and they've been rock solid.

I can't comment on temps as they're both in desktops with decent air flow.

 

[Heis]

Pro is faster and has a better projected lifetime (TBs written.) Probably runs a bit hotter.

EVO is fine for most uses, tbh. If you're building a system and on a budget, you're better off with the EVO and a faster CPU/GPU instead.

How much hotter will it run would you say? Not by a lot at all?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How much hotter will it run would you say? Not by a lot at all?

Shouldn't be by much - they have the same controller and case design and whatnot.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1462?vs=1429

It's just that performance-wise, in addition to the different NAND, they may have goosed the clockspeed on the Pro a bit, resulting in about 20% higher power consumption under load* and, presumably, slightly higher temps. (We're talking about <2w here in any case.)

If you have, like, ANY air moving past your drives, neither of them should be running even the least bit warm. But if you're wrapping them in duct tape and shoving them inside a blanket, you might have an issue.

*Under load - an SSD is going to be spending the vast majority of its time idle or close to it anyway.

 

[coercitiv]

It's just that performance-wise, in addition to the different NAND, they may have goosed the clockspeed on the Pro a bit, resulting in about 20% higher power consumption under load* and, presumably, slightly higher temps. (We're talking about <2w here in any case.)

850 EVO uses 3 controllers, depending on capacity:

• 120, 250, 500 GB models use a new MGX controller (2 cores, 550Mhz 512MB RAM)
• 1 TB model uses the same (old) MEX controller as the PROs (3 cores 400Mhz 1GB RAM)
• 2TB model uses MHX (3 cores 400Mhz 2GB RAM)

The MGX controller has lower power consumption, but may bring lower performance as well. The lower performance is hard to quantify because it only becomes apparent under extreme loads when the SLC cache is likely overrun anyway, in normal light-medium usage cases the lower capacity EVO drives are doing just fine.

As for drive temps and power consumption, keep in mind the initial power consumption of the 850 EVO for a write operation is not the end: the drive will consume additional energy while moving data from the SLC buffer to main TLC memory. Both drives will run cool. If placed in a desktop case with minimal airflow, their idle temperature will be the case temperature.

850 Pro is usually overkill for most users. The only reason to consider it would be if local market was so skewed that the price difference would be minimal.