Samsung 850 PRO - 256GB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD

I bought this hard drive to replace a Western Digital Black for extreme gaming. I play old games and new games, so this review will be detailed. My system setup consists of an i7 4770k CPU, Asus Sabertooth z87 MB, 32 GB G.Skill RAM @ 2400mhz, and of course, the Samsung 850 Pro. My tests will include games, system and programs, music and video, and a benchmark tool.1. Games - When it comes to gaming, having an SSD dramatically decreased load times for most newer games. Old games are not really affected due to how little data most of them need to load from the hard drive in today's standards. The biggest improvement came with Star Citizen. SC is still in super alpha, so nothing is optimized and load times are outrageous. Were outrageous. It used to take me nearly 2 minutes to load into hangar, now with the 850 pro, its less than 30 seconds. Other games such as Planetside 2, Mad Max, Homeworld etc have also vastly improved loading times. And its not just load times that are improved. In some games such as GTA San Andreas you can move into a new area faster than the hard drive can load things like building textures and pedestrians. The SSD solves this, no more do things just pop into existence beside you. Skyrim also has a bit of this problem too if you use a mod to give you a fast ride. Overall in the gaming department, this is really where the SSD shines to me.2. System and Software - Windows startup time is also another area that shines brightly with an SSD. Traditional hard drive takes 1 minute or more to boot, sometimes 45 seconds if you got a good drive and a fresh install of windows. With the 850 pro, my fully loaded Windows 10 Pro OS can boot up in 22 seconds. That's with no password and such. 22 seconds from power button to mouse moving on desktop. The system tray icons at the bottom right of the desktop used to take 2 or 3 minutes for all of them to load up after arriving to the desktop, now with the 850 pro they all pop up simultaneously and instantly. My web browser, Firefox, used to take about 2 or 3 seconds to load up after clicking, now before my ear can even register the second click of the mouse, the browser is fully loaded and ready to go. I have also noticed greatly increased performance in Microsoft office programs, especially excel and power point. Then came the real software test. WinRar. As a winrar test i packed up 10 GB of music to test speeds. It took less than a minute to package up (compress) the 10 GB using the Best compression method, where as on a traditional hard drive your looking at 30 to 45 minutes of waiting maybe even more since i used the best method. Unpackaging (decompression) was instantaneous at the click of the mouse. Every thing i do is like a flash of light.3. Music and Movies - Not much to say here other than transfer speeds are high, but i wouldn't keep music or movies on an SSD, they don't play better or sound better, but they do take up limited space and put wear and tear on the drive. Best to leave them on the traditional hard drive.4. Benchmark - I have included a screenshot of the benchmarking program i used to test this hard drive. As you can see all test results exceed the specifications of this hard drive. I could to many different tests using many different settings but i stuck with the default and most used one.Construction - The SSD's construction is very nice. It is very strong and solid, but also very light almost like paper. It is very smooth and slim and should fit nearly anywhere you want to put it. Also the sata and power connectors are stiff and strong.Software - The samsung magician software that is paired with the hard drive is also very nice. It shows the health and total data written to the hard drive, can change windows options to better suit the SSD and its needs, encryption, the works. The only thing is that Rapid Mode does not work for windows 10 yet but Samsung says they are working hard on it, it has something to do with the new way windows 10 manages memory.Conclusion - Overall, this is the greatest hard drive Ive ever seen. Its super fast, super strong, has great software, and is backed up by a monster 10 year warranty. I looked forward to many years of extreme gaming with this SSD. I would highly haft to recommend this SSD to everyone. It is a truly great product made by a great company from a great nation. You wont be disappointed with this SSD.If you found this review helpful, please like it!

I LOVE THIS Samsung 850 Pro! I already had a great computer... An ASUS Desktop i7, Windows 8.1, 32Gb Ram, 3Tb hard drive, Nvidia 660 something video card, and it worked great for almost everything... But I'm working on a long (over 2 hour) video project in Camtasia and Camtasia is only a 32-bit program and isn't generally designed for long videos, but my project about my www.FutureVisioning.com Hypnotherapy and Healing work grew over time way beyond what I thought it would be, so there was no way to switch to another program, and when Camtasia would have a problem and freeze or crash, it would take 3 to 4 minutes to reboot my computer, 3 minutes to reboot Camtasia and 20 minutes to load my project with my hard drive being used 100% of the time for the full 20 minutes... So every problem, crash or reboot wasted a frustrating half hour. I could see that the bottleneck was my hard drive loading into memory so I researched a lot about SSD's and the Samsung seems to be consistently the fastest and most reliable, especially with their new stacked technology it seemed the best performance and price wise, and I decided to get this Samsung 850 Pro 256 to speed up the project loading time, and I hoped that it would help with my boot up and program loading time as well.AND… OMG! :-) This is the face of a happy camper :-).The Samsung 850 came in 2 days with Prime, it was easy to install and took only about a half hour, (I got the cradle and the cable separately). The cloning software worked perfectly! I was thrilled… and now my desktop comes up in about 45 seconds and the background processes are finished about 15 seconds later.( I have read of some people booting in 15 to 20 seconds and i can't figure out how they do that but i am so happy now I really don't care! My Camtasia program opens in about 10 seconds, and my 2 hour 40 minute project with hundreds of edits opens to begin work in 2 minutes and has fully loaded all sound and video files on the timeline in 3 minutes! and rendering my project out to an mp4 seems faster as well. I expect that when Camtasia gets around to making a 64 bit version everything will take another leap in loading and processing time. I am using Adobe Premier Pro now to color correct my videos and I may use it for editing next time because it is 64 bit and has far more bells and whistles, like comlete color correction capabilities and in it I can scroll through at high speed and see every high speed frame and hear high speed audio. I don't know if I could have done this without the Samsung but it is bery cool to do that now.I don't even mind if Camtasia crashes now (which it doesn't seem to do as often) because it saves the last version reliably and it is so fun to use the stopwatch in my phone to see how fast everything comes back to life. Outlook opens faster, maybe 20 seconds, Word is almost instant, Firefox is also almost instant, I can have many programs open at once, and play many videos all at the same time. (I am not sure what the practical value playing many videos at once is because I can't follow them all, but it is still fun to do!) This is one of the most fun and satisfying purchases I have ever made! Thank you Amazon and Samsung!