Until recently you had two choices when it came to upgrading storage on your PC: speed or size. If you wanted size you went with a spinning hard drive. For speed, you went with a solid-state drive and a strategy for storing all your excess files somewhere else. The rise of 1TB SSDs ended that compromise, and now Samsung is taking internal SSD storage to the next level—but it will cost you.
The Korea-based company recently announced 2TB versions of its popular 850 and 850 Pro SSDs. Similar to previous 850 drives, the 2TB models use Samsung’s 128GB 3D V-NAND flash chips. The drives are not yet available for purchase, and Samsung did not announce a price in its press release. Other sites are reporting the pricing will be $800 for the 850 and $1,000 for the 850 Pro, however, or right about double the cost of the 1TB 850 SSD models.
The new 2TB drives appear to be using the same SATA 3.0 interface as its predecessors, which is great for most users but may not thrill hardcore video editors. Samsung says it is now working on V-NAND SSDs with M.2 (PCIe) interfaces, as well as mSATA.
The impact on you at home: If you’re willing to fork over the money, the 2TB 850 EVO or 850 Pro are nice choices for a mix of large capacity and blazing SSD speed. Samsung also guarantees the 850 Evo will last a minimum of five years or up to 150 terabytes worth of writes, and the 850 Pro will keep chugging for 10 years up to 300TBs worth of writes. That’s a pretty good guarantee and should be enough to ease the concerns some people still have about SSDs—even though recent tests have proven that SSD durability fears are unfounded.