Samsung 850 EVO 2TB SSD revisited - 6 months of time, 40TBs of writes, and one firmware later...

Back on July 24th 2015, I purchased my first 850 EVO SSD. A whopping 2TB in size, which was an admittedly huge investment:

• My experience with the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB SSD, and how it fits into my hybrid home lab strategy

But its fate was to be my "daily driver." Used and abused all day and much of the evening. The same Windows 10 install is booted natively some days in my laptop, and other times, as an ESXi 6 Windows 10 VM in my SuperServer Workstation.

So that first 30 days, this drive had to work well, or it had to go back to Newegg. My order was so "early days" that Amazon didn't even have them in stock yet, so I went with Newegg. Luckily, even with that first firmware, it seemed to work out well. Then the months went by...

Samsung 850 EVO 2 TB 2.5" SSD

• Amazon - Samsung 850 EVO 2 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E2T0B/AM)

• Newegg - SAMSUNG 850 EVO MZ-75E2T0B/AM 2.5" 2 TB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Now, 6 months of happy ownership later, I figured it was time to check in on its performance again, having been bitten by some Samsung 840 PRO mSATA performance problems in the past. So I booted my 850 EVO back up on a ThinkPad W520 laptop that I call tZilla. Luckily, things turned out pretty well, again, with Samsung improving the ownership experience.

Today, Saturday, is a great day for housekeeping, since the demands of work are less likely to get in the way should something go a little sideways.

Earlier this week, when doing some Samsung 950 PRO NVMe Windows driver updates recently, I noticed that Samsung Magician 4.9.5 had been released. So I installed 4.9.5 on this W520 too, and it suggested the new firmware EMT02B6Q, since I was still back at EMT01B6Q.

To prepare to upgrade and minimize risk, I first made sure I had a complete system backup using Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, and made sure my SSD wasn't more than 90% full.

I then ran some quick checks on performance to get some baselines, for a simple before-and-after comparison. Finally, I fired up the Camtasia video recording, just in case something interesting happened. Turns out I'm glad I did!

Video

Benchmark software used - used at default install settings

• HD Tune Pro 5.60

• AS SSD Benchmark 1.8.5636.37293

• ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.47

Download Samsung Magician to update your Samsung 850 EVO firmware:

• Samsung Magician 4.9.5 site
  Samsung Magician 4.9.5 direct download

Observations made and lessons learned

1. Backup first, as is always a good idea, especially when doing firmware upgrades to your boot drive.

2. If you're upgrading your Samsung 850 EVO, you may want to leave your system alone for a while after the upgrade, since there's a noticeable performance impact and some elevated drives temps right after the firmware upgrade shutdown/power up, when Windows 10 Defrag kicks off a rather lengthly background TRIM operation of some sort, likely keeping the SSD's controller busy.

3. During that SSD busy-time, Windows 10 kept warning me every few minutes with a pop-out window from the Action Center, pictured below:

4. The duration of the degradation seems to be about 1 hour per TB of capacity, so for me, that meant about 2 hours of performance degradation.

5. It appears both read and write speeds went up quite a bit at the crucial 4K size, and the overall average speed improved by roughly 18%, evident in the screenshots below, taken from video playback.

6. I cannot really determine if the firmware or the new TRIM optimizations are what sped things up here, only time will tell if these speeds remain the same over time. This drive is about 85% full, also pictured below.

See also at TinkerTry

• World's fastest consumer SSD - Samsung 950 PRO M.2 NVMe benchmark results

• My experience with the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB SSD, and how it fits into my hybrid home lab strategy

• Superguide: SuperServer home virtualization lab storage tiers, platinum through bronze, how many efficient drives fit inside this tiny chassis?

• My 1TB mSATA Samsung 840 EVO SSD read speed slowdown, no regrets, there's a fix

• Here's a bunch of storage related stuff I learned this month, including experience with my new 1TB SSD

• Order a TinkerTry'd Supermicro SuperServer Bundle - powerful and efficient home virtualization lab solutions

• Superguide: Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T - THE Ultimate Home Virtualization Lab

See also

Samsung's download site for all consumer SSDs at samsung.com/samsungssd.

• The Ultimate Guide To SSD Benchmark Software
  Oct 01 2015 by Les Tokar at The SSD Review