Samsung 860 Pro 4TB SSD Review

Conclusion

Products like the Samsung 860 Pro 4TB definitely fall into the “easy to sum up” category.

It’s as fast as you could want a SATA 6 Gb/s drive to be, and with the added benefit of being positively enormous capacity. Yes, to some degree there is a price to be paid for such enormous capacity, but this is part of a range of products so you’re guaranteed to find one to suit your needs as well as your budget.

What we particularly like has to be that size though. There are many of us who have a motley crew of SSDs in our systems, with the accompanying spaghetti to cable route, because the endless reduction in price of SSDs along with their initially small size meant that if you wanted the performance – and it’s addictive to get such transfer speeds so you do – you had to compromise on capacity. Now with the Samsung 860 Pro there is no compromise. Rather than seeking out motherboards that support 6+ SSDs along with the saturation of SATA lanes that diminish the performance of that many, instead you can go with one drive and bin off the rest.

In fact a lot of the SSD OS + Mechanical HDD setups only have a one or two terabyte HDD. This is even bigger than those. Add that to the insane performance that you can get from a small M.2 NVMe drive and in one fell swoop we’ve got from either SSD+HDD or umpteen SSDs into a single M.2 for the OS and this gigantic SSD for the data. You can install your entire Steam, Battle.net, Uplay and Origin libraries without having to constantly juggle current games and then sit and wait to redownload old ones when you fancy a change.

Right now it’s a little bit expensive. There is no getting around that. Therefore it’s strictly for the enthusiast or people who want to consolidate their lots of smaller SSDs into one larger whole. But what this does do is give us a glimpse into the future. Not that long ago a 1TB SSD cost four figures, but now it’s around the 250-300 mark, a price point once reserved for 128GB SSDs. Thus the Samsung 860 Pro 4TB shows that in a year or so this will be affordable for the majority of us, rather than the lucky few.

For now, we can sit and dream of it, and the Samsung 860 Pro 4TB is definitely a dream worthy product.

  

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