Features:

  • Storage Capacity: 1TB Solid State Drive
  • Form Factor: M.2 SATA
  • Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s Interface, compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s & SATA 1.5 Gb/s interface
  • Sequential Read Speed (Up To): 550 MB/s
  • Sequential Write Speed (Up To): 520 MB/s
Buy it. Just do it.

Wow. I don't know why I waited so long to do this, I've known my computer had an M.2 slot for a while now, and finally took the plunge and bought this Samsung 860 Evo SSD. I should have done this as soon as I bought the computer, lol. For reference, the laptop that I installed this in is an Acer Aspire R5-571t. If your laptop will support the newer Samsung SSD (970 right now) then maybe buy it. I bought this one in particular for compatibility with my Acer motherboard. This laptop won't run the newer SSD but it will run this one. It's definitely worth doing. It was very easy to install, but remember to buy the screw. Samsung doesn't provide one with the drive, and this laptop doesn't come with a screw, either, although it does have the riser. It took about two hours to clone a 1TB SATA drive over to the new Samsung SSD, using Samsung Migration software. The speed improvements are just phenomenal. Even on fast boot, the original hard drive took a long time to boot. Now it boots very fast, just seconds, apps and programs open almost immediately, and downloads are even faster. The battery life improvements are very noteworthy, as well. The battery never lasted longer than 4 hours with the original hard drive, now I can get over 6 hours or more even watching videos. This is exactly what this laptop needed, it's just about perfect now. Here's a quick tip: Download Samsung Magician. As long as your SSD shows up on Samsung Magician software, and it says it's compatible with your system, you're good to use Samsung Migration to clone your old drive. Even if the new SSD doesn't show up in Windows file explorer. On my laptop, I could find the drive in the disk management menu and the BIOS, but not file explorer, until everything got cloned over to the new SSD. Now it shows up just fine.

Very good and fast

My start up is almost instant when I turn on my computer. I bought the 500gb M.2 Now my load speeds are super fast all my games load up way faster nearly instantly not exaggerating this was a major upgrade I replaced a HHD I bought a few months ago but anyways I literally threw that shit away I reinstalled windows 10 to this M.2 best thing I bought for my PC besides my GTX 1080ti and 16gb ram. You have to own one to believe how much better they are then standard HHD or even SSD Ive owned all 3 models of hard drives the M.2 is much better it use to take about 1 to 2 mins before for me to start up my computer now it only takes 5 secs tops for it to start up windows and log in, all my apps and desktop icons are instantly loaded everything is ready to go no waiting at all this thing is a beast. so if you want near instant load speeds buy a M.2 ssd take my word A very good upgrade for you PC!

Works as expected

Works as expected. Comes with a 5 year warranty. Replaces the 850 EVO which was a fantastic SSD. The 860 Evo is a little faster but hardly noticeable and comes with a way better warranty. My computer starts in about 15 seconds and most apps load instantly. Great for gaming too! The 960 Evo NVMe is 2-3 times faster and uses the PCIe interface. The 860 Evo uses the Sata interface (slower). My computer can use either one with 2 M.2 slots. I chose the 860 Evo based on the lower price. The 960 Evo is faster but unless you have huge files to load you probably won't appreciate the speed increase. Versus a hard disk drive which operates at roughly at 50 megabytes per second maximum (although they all claim 6GB per second), SSD's run at roughly 500 megabytes to 1800 megabytes per second at maximum speed, 10-30 times faster and the Evo has a 5 year warranty! Say goodby to HDD's which last 2-3 years.

New and Snappy Product from an Old, Reliable Lineage

Already converted the 2.5-inch drive in my HP Envy 17 to a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB drive and saw the M.2 slot and thought it would be interesting to try something new. Then Amazon brought out the 860 EVO M.2 500gb ssd and I just couldn't resist. I have to say immediately that the installation hardware-wise is just like all the M.2 installs on YouTube, etc. Plug in at 30-degree angle with the five-contact side of the drive on the right with the sticker side up. Didn't come with a mounting screw, but I ordered a box with some in it (M2x3 with 4mm-4.5mm head I have been told.) M2x3 with 4.5mm and it was installed. Cloning didn't work for me because of the large drive to smaller drive issue -- which left me with the regular SSD as boot and the M.2 as second drive. Since my laptop is brand new and doesn't have much personal stuff on it yet, I just decided to get a Recovery Drive USB key from HP and reload it. On a hunch I carefully uninstalled the regular SSD, leaving the M.2 as only drive. Ran the Recovery drive and the M.2 was recognized and loaded just fine (although took forever to get all the updates installed.) Read HP forum and watch YouTube reference all the installation iterations. The 860 EVO this review is about ran smooth as silk from the beginning appears to average about 540-550 read down and about 490-505 write (seq), compared to about 520 read and 490 write on the regular SSD above. I did try out the Samsung Magician software (a caching program using M.2 and system memory to speed things up) and that showed about 4700-5000 read and 4000 write. Seemed snappier to me, but read all the pros and cons on line because everyone doesn't agree on how good it is. Bottom line -- the 860 EVO M.2 is a brand new successor to a tried and tried product (850 EVO M.2) and I think it shows. I expect to have good service and modestly better performance. At this point I would recommend any of the 850-860 line SSD or M.2 drives to a friend.

For those looking for Consistancy, Integrity, Reliability, Excellent Drive

The drive requires to be formatted before it can be seen by windows 10 operating system. I copies 141 gig file and the drive performed at a consistent speed of about 500 Mbps. I have not even used the Samsung magician software to optimize the drive. I will do that later. This drive uses the same controller as the Samsung 860 and 860 Pro. The only difference is that the 860 Pro uses TLC Memory and 860 uses the TLC NAND. The other similarity is that both the drives have 2TB Ram. This drive is better than most NVME SSD's because it does not Throttle under load. If you are looking for a reliable and consistency, please buy this drive without further ado. You will be glad you did.

Good SATA M.2, hardly as fast as PCIe M.2. Make sure you know compatibility.

Good SATA M.2, hardly as fast as PCIe M.2. Make sure you know compatibility. There are numerous M.2 drives, PCIe are the latest and greatest but your motherboard has to be PCIe compatible (if you have a SATA M.2 it's likely it is NOT). This is a SATA and will only work on SATA M.2 motherboard. This is about as fast as you're going to get with a SATA M.2. I reviewed numerous and this had been found to be the fastest for the cost.

Test: 860 Evo Vs. 970 Evo

No significant difference in load time for games, but major difference in transfer speeds when moving data from 970 Evo to 860 Evo. When I monitored the SSD usage from Ctrl+alt+delete and transferred 50gb files from my 970 to my 860, the 860 was at 100% while my 970 was at 20%. That means my 970 is 5 times faster / the 860 is 5 times slower. But when loading games, I tested Rocket League, Assaasians Creed Odyssey, and Ghost Recon Wildlands, I measured no difference in load time with Rocket League, and 1-2 second difference in the other two games. Meaning the Samsung 970 Evo is 1-2 seconds faster at loading much larger games, but no easily measurable difference between load times for smaller games.

Easy to Install (as in attach to the motherboard), but.....

How to clone SSD from HDD on a Dell i7559-2512BLK using a UEFI boot system keeping all Windows and OEM partitions in place. Other systems may vary. -Assuming you have an external backup drive or another drive to backup and/or temporarily move files to. -Have a minimum 1 GB USB stick to make a rescue boot device -Download the Macrium Reflect v7 Free Edition and research how to use it for image backups, cloning and making rescue media -Don’t bother with the Samsung Data Migration software Hopefully this saves you the days I spent chasing info on the internet, over multiple attempts, to figure this out. First, to keep things simple, I went ahead and moved enough files off of the existing “OS” HDD to my external drive to have enough room to clone to the SSD. This meant that the megabytes of files on the HDD did not exceed the capacity of the SSD. I gave about 20% head room to make sure there would be no problems. Now this step saved me from losing everything in trying to get things to work and going too far in the wrong direction. Use Macrium to make a disk image backup of your existing HDD. This can really save you. Next, use Macrium to make a rescue USB. Do not skip this step. This is key. Now use Macrium to clone your HDD to the SSD, keeping all five of the HDD partitions in the same order on the SSD. To do this (it seems) you have to do some math to manually size the Primary partition. Macrium will only auto resize the last partition dragged over to fit. You select the partition, and there is a menu below that you go into, in order to manually set the size. Then drag over your other 2 partitions. If your math is off a bit and you have extra room, Macrium will let you know how much space is not allocated and you can adjust the Primary partition accordingly. After the clone is finished and you restart, the computer will still boot from the HDD and not the SSD. To save you hours or even days of frustration, you restart with the USB stick attached to the computer, and repeatedly press F12. When the boot option menu comes up, you should see the option to boot from both the SSD and the USB stick. If the SSD isn’t there then you have a problem, but if the SSD is showing, go ahead and chose to BOOT FROM THE USB STICK. This will fire up the Macrium rescue software and you can use it to pick which disk to boot Windows from, and choose the SSD. Now when you restart, Windows will ask you which version of Windows you want to boot from. I chose the lower volume number, and sure enough, that booted from the SSD. In file explorer, there will be a Windows icon next to the drive letter that is running Windows. Using the disk capacity to verify I had the correct volume picked, I restarted again. Once again Windows asked which volume I wanted to run Windows from, and I went through the option make the proper volume the default. If you blow up your HDD to remove the Windows partitions, then it won’t ask you which volume you want to run Windows from any more. After you have things running well (doing a few startups and shut downs to make sure) you can start moving files from the external back to the HDD, or rework the HDD to remove the Windows related partitions and then start moving your files.

Great M.2 Chip

A TB SSD for under $300? Man... Been waiting for these days to come. When I can replace my 4TB mechanical drive, I'll be so happy. It's the only one that I open and the system hangs for a few seconds before displaying the files in Explorer. I currently have a 960 PCIe M.2 (500GB) for my system drive, 2x 850 EVO SATA SSD (500GB each, RAID 0) and now this M.2 chip. Install was easy, though I did put it in the wrong M.2 slot at first. I have a Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 7 board and it has 3 slots for this form factor. Out of the 2 that were open, I chose the wrong one, even after referring to my mobo manual. Only one of them supported SATA M.2 chips and I missed that note. After I fixed this, everything worked great. I ran CrystalDiskMark on my 1TB RAID0 drive(s) against the new M.2 chips and, as expected, the 2 older 850 drives striped were far and away the quicker drives. The new M.2 beat them in a couple of tests, but only by a small amount. The other tests where the 850's won were by far. So, anyone looking to gain the most speed from their drives, they will want to look in to multiple drives in a RAID.

Easy to clone with a lot of software and M.2's rock

Short version The 1 TB Samsung EVO in RAPID mode is the way to go . Use Samsungs data migration and magician after the cloning is done , make sure to get an enclosure . I bought Aluminum M.2 (B Key) to USB 3.1 Type-C M.2 SSD Enclosure Portable External Solid State Drive Enclosure (Black) Hope the rest helps For the storage and price made this a great buy. I had 2 of the 500gb,s at around 100$ I was bummed because i missed the 119$ sale on the 1TB but it came back as 127$ so i jumped on that and returned the 500gb . I used Aluminum M.2 NGFF(B Key) to USB 3.1 Type-C M.2 SSD Enclosure Portable External Solid State Drive Enclosure (Black) to clone this from the OEM 256GB HDD and The 1rst time on my 500gb it went well with Macrium free cloning software but the other 2 times it would not let me expand the C: Drive so i had a un allocated 250 gb on the 500gb's So I decided to use Samsung's data migration and it worked almost perfect . The only complaints are that in the recovery area if you hold shift and then click restart you get a sub menu as to where you can trouble shoot , use command prompt etc, Well this only provided 3 out of say 7 to 8 options . I have no idea what happened . But the system works fine and i know how to create by own recovery partition using EASYBCD 2.3 also free only uses about 4gb but they say to partition 6 i partitioned 5 . I also went right to system restore and made back up's to avoid hassles So Now I have a NEW 9/18 production date Asus Q536FD which I love , 4k ,touch screen , back lit keyboard , it came with 256gb ssd and 2tb 5400 spinning drive so i swapped to 1TB Samsung M.2 ssd and 500gb Samsung 2.5" ssd for extra storage (like ill need it lol ) But the nice thing about the Samsung 860 evo m.2 is that on Samsung Magician you can turn on RAPID mode and i was getting double to almost triple the speed advertised of 550mbps and receiving 980/860 I was impressed and i though it was a mistake but i also tried the 970 evo nvme and with that only got 1200/1000 and transfers and windows downloads are only about 1 second apart . Plus this only gets up to 112 degrees F (well i have not tried gaming but heavy workloads etc )where as the nvme ave. 148 F too hot for me and gaming over 160 F the packing even states gets up to 70 C which i did not see when i bought it so instead of overheating my new laptop i switched to the 860 evo m.2 and have no regrets now that i finally have the 1TB drive as this will do 2400TB written where as the 500gb or smaller only write 500 TB or less the less the drive the less it lasts . Didn't find that out untill i saw quite a few you tube videos and read a lot of the Amazon reviews .

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