In the past few weeks, we've seen a steady stream of new solid state drive releases, from the likes of Plextor, Crucial, and SanDisk. Our review of the Plextor M6M mSATA drive can be found here , and we covered Crucial's MX100 series here .

Strong Performance; High Endurance; Long Warranty

Somewhat Pricey; No Power Loss Protection

Ever since our first discovery of the 470 Series SATA 2 SSD way back in 2010, Samsung has been unstoppable, carving out a new standard with every SSD release. The release of the 850 Pro SSD with 3D V-NAND is a perfect example of just that.

Today Samsung is unveiling their latest SSD and successor to the mighty 840 Pro. Named the 850 Pro it is not only faster than the 840 Pro and possibly the fastest SATA SSD money can buy, but more importantly it is also one of the most reliable thanks to its use of V-NAND flash memory.

Considering the breakneck one-upsmanship we saw among early SSD makers, record-setting iterations have been slower to arrive over the last two years with 2012's Samsung SSD 840 Pro series maintaining relevance among a laundry list of competing options after price cuts brought it from $1.05 per...

Samsung says the 850 Pro is the fastest; most reliable SATA SSD available and we'll buy that line until we test the SanDisk Extreme Pro or experience a failure

It certainly isn't the best value considering its premium over the Extreme Pro and availability of drives like the Crucial MX100; RAPID isn't as useful as you may think

The Samsung SSD 850 PRO gives enthusiasts about everything they could want in a single SATA SSD. Like drives before it, Samsung has infused the SSD 850 PRO with new technology to make it a class leader in terms of performance, endurance and warranty.

Top-in-class performance; 10-year warranty; Low overall power consumption

Samsung SSD Evo; OCZ Vertex 460; Crucial/Micron M550; Crucial MX100; SanDisk Extreme Pro; SanDisk Extreme Pro (480GB; SanDisk 1Ynm; eX2 ABL MLC Flash; SATA; Samsung SSD 840 Pro; Intel SSD 730; Top-in-class performance; 10-year warranty; Low overall power consumption; Write power consumption higher...

Before we weigh in with our final verdict, we'll bust out a few of our famous value scatter plots. The best solutions will gravitate toward the upper left corner of the plot, which signifies high performance and low prices.

Samsung does not cease to amaze me with their SSDs as the 850 Pro just kills it in every aspect. The performance is there. The endurance is the best of the class. Heck, even Samsung's feature and software suites beat the competition by a mile.

Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB Review Manufacturer: Samsung UK price (as reviewed): Approx £145 (inc VAT) US price (as reviewed): MSRP $199.99 (ex Tax) Despite being introduced a couple of years ago now, Samsung's SSD 840 PRO continues to find itself at the top of performance benchmarks, with other...

Let's first step back a few years, to when SSDs first started to appear. They were very expensive, low capacity affairs. Sequential speeds were faster than HDDs, but not by much. Access times were much faster than HDDs, and of course small file random performance also was, in general, much better...

Silky smooth operation as a system drive; Outstanding sequential reading and writing performance; even at very low queue depths; Outstanding 4K random writing performance; at low queue depths; Outstanding 4k random reading performance at very low; and very high queue depths; Sustainable writing...

Nothing to mention

The 850 Pro is Samsung's new flagship consumer SSD, and the follow-up to the wildly popular 840 Pro, which was one of the best performing SSDs money could buy when it launched in September 2012. We're reviewing the 512GB model here which is priced at ￡232 (US$399, around AUD$420).