Samsung Announces 860 PRO And 860 EVO SATA SSDs

After more than three years of ruling the consumer SATA SSD market, the Samsung 850 series is being replaced. The 850 PRO and 850 EVO that first brought 3D NAND flash memory to the consumer SSD market are being retired to make room for the new 860 PRO and 860 EVO SSDs. The new 860 drives are not revolutionary the way the 850s were, but instead represent continued evolution of Samsung’s SSD technology.

The 850 series, while a rock of the SATA SSD market, has not remained unchanged from its introduction in 2014. In mid 2015, Samsung introduced 2TB models of the 850 PRO and 850 EVO, and inside the new models was an updated controller with support for enough LPDDR3 DRAM to manage 2TB of flash. In 2016, Samsung updated the entire 850 series to use their third-generation 48-layer 3D NAND. This new NAND didn’t bring any significant performance changes, but because the capacity per die doubled, the available drive capacity options shifted: the 120GB and 128GB models were retired, and a 4TB 850 EVO was introduced. A 4TB 850 PRO was promised, but never shipped: disappointing yields from Samsung’s 48L 3D NAND helped kick off an industry-wide shortage of NAND flash memory that drove prices way up and guaranteed a 4TB 850 PRO would nearly impossible to sell profitably.

The technological changes the 860 series brings are no bigger than what the 850 series has already undergone. The NAND flash memory is updated once again, this time to Samsung’s 64-layer 3D NAND. The whole product line is moving over to the latest MJX SSD controller, and the DRAM used will now be LPDDR4. The 4TB PRO model is finally being released, but there are no further capacity increases coming at this time, and the entry level is still the same 250/256GB.

Looking at the numbers, the performance specifications are barely changed from the 850 series, and this is because the SATA interface hasn’t gotten any faster since the 850 was introduced. The write endurance ratings have been simplified however: write endurance is now proportional to drive capacity even at the high end, and the 860 PRO’s endurance is twice that of the 860 EVO’s at each capacity point.

The most notable change is the reduction of the PRO’s warranty period from the outstanding 10 years down to the same 5 years as the 860 EVO. The other big surprise is that there will be mSATA versions of the 860 EVO; this is the first major new mSATA SSD in a long time, as most product lines have abandoned it in favor of M.2 SATA. The 860 EVO will introduce a 2TB option to Samsung’s M.2 SATA lineup.

For the first few years, the Samsung 850 PRO and 850 EVO were essentially unchallenged in the SATA SSD market. All of their most successful competitors were slower and cheaper, because nobody could match Samsung’s performance. That changed in 2017 when several of Samsung’s biggest competitors beat them to the introduction of 64L 3D NAND in the consumer SATA market. Drives like the Intel 545s, SanDisk Ultra3D and Crucial MX500 have renewed competition for mainstream consumer SSDs by matching or beating Samsung’s performance while putting pressure on their pricing. Samsung’s response is due. By keeping the MLC-based PRO tier while their competition is almost entirely switching to TLC NAND, Samsung will likely hold on to some performance crowns with their premium product, and they’ll have the highest write endurance. But the more mainstream 860 EVO will have to fight for its place in the market.

Samsung’s decision to keep the PRO tier around and based on MLC NAND signals that they will almost certainly do the same for their PCIe SSDs. Whatever they introduce as the successor to the 960 PRO will probably stand out from the crowd in a way that their premium SATA SSDs cannot. Samsung’s NVMe SSD controllers still seem to be the fastest options, though competitors like Silicon Motion and Phison are starting to catch up.

Micron Introduces 5200 Series Enterprise SATA SSDs

Today Micron is updating their enterprise SATA SSD family to use their 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. Aside from the new flash, the new 5200 series is almost identical to the 5100 series, but the broad range of options has been reduced to a more manageable quantity.

Where the 5100 series included three tiers of write endurance and overprovisioning—ECO, PRO and MAX—the 5200 only includes the ECO and PRO tiers, and the PRO tier has been pared down to just two capacities.

Micron says the most popular models in the 5100 series have been the 1TB and 2TB capacities. Demand in the larger 4TB and 8TB is being held back by two factors: a dearth of alternative 4TB and 8TB SATA options is dissuading buyers that want to ensure they have multiple suppliers, and many of the use cases for such large drives also require PCIe performance.

Micron has made the requisite firmware changes to support the new 3D NAND and they have made some minor tweaks to improve performance consistency, but otherwise the 5200 uses the same basic firmware architecture as the 5100.

Unlike the 5100 series, the 5200 series won’t be available in the M.2 form factor. Instead, the 5100 series will continue to service the M.2 market and the low capacity 2.5″ market until 2019. The demand in those segments is largely for boot drives, and being a generation behind doesn’t have much impact on that use case.

The performance changes from the 5100 series to the 5200 series are mostly insignificant. The smallest 480GB ECO model sees a drop in random read performance from 93k IOPS to 81k IOPS, but otherwise the ECO drives are rated for similar performance. Among the PRO models, the biggest performance change is a drop in random write speed from 37k IOPS to 32k IOPS.

The most significant spec changes are the write endurance ratings. The 5200 ECO has mostly increased the write endurance of at least 1 Drive Write Per Day, including almost double the endurance for the two smallest models. However, the largest 7.68 TB model is still rated for the same 8.4 PB (0.6 DWPD). On the PRO models, endurance has been greatly reduced, from 2.5 DWPD to 1.3-1.7 DWPD.

The 5200 announcement may seem to be an uninteresting update to an uninteresting product segment, but SATA SSDs still make up a majority of Micron’s enterprise SSD sales. Micron is expecting PCIe SSDs to overtake SATA SSDs in the enterprise space this year, but demand for SATA SSDs isn’t plummeting. In fact, overall volume is still increasing even as SATA market share falls, because the storage industry as a whole is experiencing strong growth. Enterprise SATA SSDs will remain a major part of Micron’s storage business for at least another generation or two.