Samsung 860 PRO 4 TB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (MZ-76P4T0), Black

Product Information

The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For But first, the shape issue. Any M.2 drive you are looking at will be labeled with a four- or five-digit number as part of its specifications or model name. It's a measurement, in millimeters: The first two numbers define the drive's width, the second two the length. First, consider the bus type. M.2 drives come in SATA bus and PCI Express bus flavors, and the drive requires a compatible slot to work. Some M.2 slots support both buses on a single slot, but drives support just one or the either, so make sure the SSD you buy matches the bus type available on the slot in question.

And if you're simply replacing a hard drive as your boot drive, you'll love the speed boost whichever kind you go with. We guarantee it. Though it can't quite match the gaming prowess of some of the latest generation of PCIe 4.0 speedsters, the 990 Pro with Heatsink still offers respectable gaming performance while being a thoroughbred workhorse for creative tasks. It's an appealing choice and a worthy upgrade from the 980 Pro.The SK Hynix Platinum P41 is a worthy choice for anyone looking to buy a high-performance PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSD without breaking the bank. It blew away several of our benchmark records. The P41 provides AES hardware-based encryption and a clone utility tool as well as SSD management software. Just be forewarned that with its blistering speed, you will want to add a heatsink, the one item of note that it is missing. Even PCIe 3.0 is significantly faster than SATA in straight-up sequential tests, though. But that's just sequential speeds, and how fast a drive can copy a folder from one part of itself to another isn't all that matters these days. There's also the issue of capacity, Random Read (4 KB, QD32) Up to 98,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated Sequential Write Up to 530 MB/s Sequential Write * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated M.2 slots are now common in new desktop motherboards and practically universal in late-model laptops. M.2 solid-state drives are the 2.5-inch drive distilled to its essence, extremely minimal in their design and implementation. But they're also the most complicated to understand before you buy. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Controllers are a factor of SSD buying that only ultra-geeks will care about, but they're still important. The controller is a module on the SSD that essentially acts as the processor and traffic cop for the drive, translating the firmware instructions into features like error code correction (ECC) and SMART diagnostic tools, as well as modulating how well the SSD performs in general. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot. This figure also folds into the warranty period for a drive, which (aside from a few fringe cases) will almost always be for three to five years or until you hit the TBW spec. Manufacturers have ways of reading a drive to determine how many terabytes have been written to it over its lifetime, so make sure before you submit any warranty requests that you haven't already gone over your TBW before the warranty period has expired. At the core, an SSD is just a thin circuit board studded with flash-memory and controller chips. Why not design around that? Thus the M.2 form factor was born. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot. (Credit: HP)

PCI Express 5.0 is the latest and by far the fastest. It offers substantial throughput increases, with maximum read and write speeds of up to 14,000MBps, effectively double those of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. Only the latest high-end desktops support this bus off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a motherboard and CPU transplant on an existing desktop. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor on an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Note: The board must specifically have a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, too; not every board with chipset-level support does! (Also know: Laptops can't leverage the peak speeds of these drives, yet.)If you've read through this whole buying guide and have a particular port or slot not covered yet, that's because you probably have one of the two outlier ports installed in your system: U.2 or mSATA. Speed matters, of course, but as we said most modern SSDs saturate the SATA III interface. Not all of them, though. SSDs vs. hard drives M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but there are limits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows: Even in mSATA's heyday, though, a replacement was in the works. During development, it was known as NGFF, for "Next-Generation Form Factor." As it took shape, though, it took on its current, final name: M.2. The drives would be smaller, potentially more capacious, and, most important, not necessarily reliant on SATA. Random Read (4 KB, QD1) Up to 11,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated