Very few would have thought when the Samsung 850 EVO Solid-State Drive series came out in 2014 that it would be come the number #1 best-selling SSD in the world at the end of 2017. Every storage editor and enthusiast would have laughed at you back in 2014 if you told them that the successor to that drive wouldn’t be coming out until 2018. Yet, here we are in Q1 2018 and Samsung has only now introduced the 860 EVO series. It honestly took four years for the competition to catch up or come close to being able to match the performance of the 850 EVO. The good news for Samsung is that they have had years to prepare for this day and have armed the 860 EVO with the new Samsung MJX controller along with their latest Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC (Samsung marketing spin for TLC).

The Samsung SSD 860 EVO series is designed for mainstream desktop and laptop use. Form factors for the series will include 2.5-inch SATA drives in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, mSATA drives in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities and then finally M.2 SATA drives in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. This means Samsung has pretty much every desirable capacity offered and at a wide range of price points. The Samsung SSD 860 EVO 250GB starts at just $94.99 shipped and for those that need mass storage the 4TB model tops out at $1,324.57 shipped. The sweet spot here in 2018 would be the 500GB drives at $149.99 and the 1TB drives at $289.99. You can finally get a 1TB Samsung EVO series drive for under $300. When the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB drive came out in 2014 it had an MSRP of $499.99, so in roughly four years pricing on mainstream SSDs have been slashed nearly 50%!