It took a while but we finally got our hands on the Samsung 850 Pro SSD, not a small one either, it's that nicely sized 1 TB version. It is Samsung's first SSD with innovative 3D vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory, which ensures top performance and good endurance. The SSD drive brings 3D Vertical NAND Flash memory to SSDs, also known as Samsung 2nd Gen 86Gbit 40nm MLC V-NAND. Combined with Samsung's MEX controller and customized firmware the product is fast, very fast.

We've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though and one brand quite popular in Europe has now also introduced a line of SSDs. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such, SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir... I am a fan.