B078DPCY3T

The drive performs fantastically. It truly is a successor to the 850 Evo. I purchased this drive to upgrade my laptop, and right off the bat I noticed a huge improvement. Boot to desktop was about 7 seconds. Would absolutely buy again.

Edit: For any of those curious, the specs of my laptop are as follows:
I7-3632qm Ivy Bridge @ 2.2Ghz
16gb 1600Mhz RAM
Radeon HD 7670M GPU
Samsung 250gb 860 Evo

On a side note, if you are looking to upgrade a laptop and use this drive as your main drive and are looking for a more straight forward approach, cloning your current drive over to the new SSD is fairly straight forward.

I purchased a Started USB 3.0 to 2.5″ drive converter for roughly $10 in conjunction with Macrium Reflect Free for this, and it worked perfectly with this drive. The software is super simple to use and is fully compatible with this SSD.

UPDATE: After installing the “Samsung Magician” software and enabling “Rapid Mode,” the performance of this drive has increased drastically. The second picture shows the increase from the base performance.

The hard drive in my Late 2012 iMac is starting to die. Since the hard drives in iMacs are not user accessible (at least not without major surgery), I decided to use an external drive as my boot and system drive. I bought this drive, and the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212) to house it. I put the drive in the HighPoint, plugged everything in, then…

Booted to recovery mode (Command-R at boot chime).
Reformatted the disk to HFS+ journaled (with GUID partition map).
Reinstalled MacOS.
Once MacOS was installed, I followed the prompts to migrate data from a Time Machine backup (Users, Documents, etc. I clicked all the options).

Everything is up and running great! During the OS install process, the drive format was changed to APFS (instead of HFS+) since I’m running High Sierra.

Lastly, I went into System Preferences and turned on FileVault (which is still running in the background and will probably take another day or two).

The best part: Now my 2012 iMac is even faster than the day it was brand new!

Link to the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212): HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212)

Samsung produces the best in class, market-leading solid-state drives. This is the best SATA 2.5″ SSD to buy as of early 2018. If you have an M.2 slot, go with the 960 NVMe. But, if you’re only option is to use the 2.5″ SATA connector in your laptop or PC, don’t hesitate, buy this SSD and enjoy the added performance over any mechanical drive.

Samsung Magician software is recommended, non-intrusive, and will keep the firmware across all your Samsung drives updated, and can be used to provide an added RAM cache for greater throughput when combined with this SSD.

I’ve installed and operate dozens of Samsung 840 and 850 SSD drives, and several 960 M.2 drives. All are great. I’ve used both EVO and PRO product lines. No complaints. The new 860 is simply the next generation of the 840 and 850, evolved to the 860. Great technology. High quality. Failures are rare. These products provide a much higher MTBF over most competitor products, and stomp mechanical drives.

Favorite builds now use an M.2 960 to boot the operating system and maintain personal document storage, while using the 860 for games, music and video. If money isn’t tight, run two 860 in RAID-1 for games to run extremely fast. Perfect match for Steam and Blizzard fans.

No complaints! Works great, easy to install, and will buy again whenever storage is needed and an M.2 slot isn’t available.

Bought through “Samsung Electronics DAV” and installed in a couple Haswell i5 era laptops, thus Crystal Mark scores from me seem useless…but if you want them I’ll put them up! I use several brands of SSD’s based on current pricing, durability, and needs and this just fit the build. They’re competitively priced IMO because what’s a $20 difference when it comes to a controller I prefer and MLC Vnand? I prefer m.2 in my computers if possible, but if that’s not available right now I like these 860 Evo’s.

That’s something to point out here: “V-nand” is a generic/general term and Samsung use MLC V-NAND. TLC is a lower cost NAND but it’s also V-NAND…anything vertical or 3D is V. I’m not here to educate fully, but there’s a difference in quality and this is the better MLC V-NAND. Just moving to an SSD is a huge plus so pick any of them now that fit your budget. To me, even in a used and low cost used laptop, I find the price delta of MLC vs TLC worth getting the Samsung.

Their migration software is weird. They offer 3.1.0 for DL, then once installed it sees there’s an update to 3.1.1 so I install that. The later I prefer because it is actually seamless with 3rd party cables that may hinder the older version from seeing the newly purchased drive from being a valid Samsung drive. I’d just like to see the latest software on their website and not have to DL twice. Some of us are on data caps, ya’ll. Anyway, the new software works perfectly for migration to the drive.

I’d love to test this out for you in an actually powerful desktop but those have all gone M.2 here which is my preference if you have that ability. Then for sure go Samsung again with the 960 Evo m.2 stick. All I have are laptops and pulling them out for testing isn’t much fun since they don’t have access plates (it’s like taking monitor bezels off). If you want to save a couple bucks, I go Mushkin or OCZ/Toshiba and I’d be perfectly fine with those picks too I’m sure…I’ll never wear out a TLC SSD either. Perhaps this Samsung will drift into something else that needs that comfy feeling, but even the eldest of the eldest SSD hasn’t thrown one flag up yet. This is just a preferred model at this exact point in time and pricing.