Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SATA SSD Review

Conclusion

It's easy to become blasé as modern hardware evolves at a staggering pace. You can become so used to manufacturers ensuring the accuracy of Moore's Law that you take it for granted.

This tiny piece of hardware, finger sized, contains a 500GB Solid State Drive. Samsung's 3D V-NAND chips are a marvel of technology, compressing something which used to be huge into something so very small.

Indeed it's this tiny size which is the real selling point of the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 drive. A whopping amount of storage in a small space allows you to use it in mATX systems without having to worry about where to install a drive. Case modders will really enjoy the freedom it brings. Once it's installed you hardly even notice it, flat against the motherboard. You can have blistering speeds, and the 750 EVO M.2 is certainly fast, without compromising aesthetics.

As we said in our introduction the nature of M.2 drives is such that you need to be aware of which method your motherboard supports, and having tested the 850 EVO this is even truer. After all, a product which brings enthusiast levels of performance like this deserves an enthusiast motherboard, but the decision to go with SATA M.2 rather than PCI Express does leave the Samsung rather bereft of hardcore options.

So if you've got a compatible laptop, mini PC etc and a desire for a compact storage solution then the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SSD is a fantastic choice offering blistering speeds and huge capacity at a reasonable price, worthy of our OC3D Gold Award. If, however, you don't require your storage to be so discreet, then plump for the regular Samsung 850 EVO and save a headache, if you really need Samsung M.2 for your high performance desktop PC then give the SM951 a look but don't tell them we told you!

Thanks to Samsung for supplying the 850 EVO M.2 SATA for review. Discuss it in our OC3D Forums.