Samsung 860 Evo 250GB

VERDICT

Faster and longer-lasting than the 850 Evo yet still competitively priced, this is the new king of SATA SSDs

- James Archer

EVEN IF SAMSUNG’S smartphones tend to play second fiddle to the ever-popular iPhone, the Korean firm looks an awful lot like the best in the world at consumer-grade storage. Besides the 960 Pro (Shopper 348) and 960 Evo (Shopper 349) setting the standard for NVMe drives, there’s also the (much more affordable) SATA-based 850 Evo. This has had pride of place in our Best Buys for absolutely ages, and for good reason – its rapid read/write speeds were excellent in 2014, and they still hold up today.

Perhaps that’s why it’s taken so long – surprisingly long, in fact – for a replacement to arrive. The Samsung 860 Evo initially appears to be a rather minor update: it still uses stacked V-NAND memory and the 6Gbit/s SATA3 interface, and the advertised sequential write speed has been modestly increased from 540MB/s to 550MB/s. The quoted write speed hasn’t changed at all, sticking at 520MB/s. You get the same choice of capacities as well: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. This time, the two largest options are available at launch, instead of coming months or years later.

AIM LONGER