The Samsung 850 EVO is the latest in its affordable line of performance SSDs and shows Samsung's desire to push the solid state game along, even at the lower end of the price/performance stack.

It's been only a few short months since Samsung's 850 Pro delivered the company's long-lasting 32-bit 3D NAND to the high-end/corporate market.

3D NAND promise drive longevity; Good performance for the price

RAPID software creates a risk of data loss

Samsung is at the ready with a brand new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company's current flagship SSD 850 PRO , but the new EVO is Samsung's first...

There are only a few names in the industry that build exceptional SSDs that are affordable and very reliable these days, Toshiba, Plextor, OCZ, Micron, the latest Corsair SSDs and then there is Samsung.

Samsung has an excellent overall package here, with great features, innovative technologies, performance, and durability.

Slim form factor; Very fast out of the box; Blistering fast with RAPID Mode enabled; Data Migration software; Large capacity

Modest price premium

The Samsung 850 EVO offers excellent performance and features. Backed with 5 year warranty, the drive is definitely the best all-around SSD that your money can buy. We give the 850 EVO our coveted Golden Bear Award. The Samsung 850 EVO offers excellent performance and features.

Before we weigh in with our final verdict, we'll bust out a few of our famous value scatter plots. These plots use an overall performance score compared against a common baseline. This score is based on a subset of the performance data from our full suite, with CrystalDiskMark's sequential transfer...

At launch the 850 EVO 250GB costs a little more than the bottom of the barrel drives, but offers performance, endurance, and a five-year warranty never before seen at this price level.

The Samsung 850 EVO 120GB and 500GB drives have 128GB and 512GB (1GB byte = 1,000,000,000 bytes) of NAND on board respectively and yield user addressable capacities of 111GB and 465GB (1Gib = 1,073,741,824 bytes) in Windows as shown in the drive properties.

Can Samsung pull off a "three-peat?" The Seoul, South Korea-based memory giant this week unveiled the 850 EVO series, its latest solid-state drives for professionals and consumers that Samsung claims will deliver unmatched performance and endurance due to its 3-bit vertical NAND stacked-cell...