26.12.2018

I have a 7 year old Dell XPS 8300 Desktop PC with a 1TB HDD which I wanted to breath new life into by installing an SSD to improve boot, file and program load times. I wanted to make the SSD the system/boot disk and relegate the old HDD to secondary large volume storage.I needed a 2.5" to 3.5" mounting frame to allow me to install the new 2.5" SSD in a 3.5" bay inside the PC. There are so many choices of adapter available on Amamzon and I eventually chose this one https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075FH3KTT/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 You will make your own choice but even though I was only installing a single SSD, this adapter allowed me to add a second in the future if I wanted.I have done a separate review for the adapter, it was a very good choice for me.I was initially a little hesitant beforehand about attempting the install, but it turned out to be much more straightforward than expected. After disconnecting the power from the PC, I screwed the SSD to the base of the adapter then the adapter into the drive bay beneath the existing HDD (all screw holes lined up), then connected the SATA cable (provided with the adapter) to the SSD and motherboard SATA port and then the power cable (there was a spare connected power cable already inside the PC which I used, but there are also two supplied with the adapter) to the SSD. That was it in terms of physical installation.I powered up the PC and then used Samsung's Data Migration software downloaded from their support website (details come with the SSD). Samsung will recommend you clone the SSD by first connecting it externally using a SATA to USB adapter, but although this would be necessary with a Laptop, as long as you have space in the 3.5" bay to install the SSD and the original HDD (true for most desktops) my method will be faster and less fiddly.I made sure that I either deleted or moved to external backup all data (non system) that wouldn't need to be on the new SSD so that my 1TB HDD had a lot less than 500GB (in fact It was less than 100GB as I archived most of my non system data offline). I then ran the Samsung Data Migration tool to clone my HDD to the SSD. The time it takes depends o how much data to clone, but for me it was fast.When the clone finished successfully, I restarted the PC and using F2 key (different for various PC's) immediately at start up let me into the system BIOS. Here you need to reset the boot sequence so that the new SSD is number one for boot. After saving this in the BIOS and exiting, the PC booted up from the new SSD in about 1/10th of the previous time.Once happy everything was stable, I reformatted the old 1TB HDD which is now holding any large volume data that I don't need the high performace of the SSD for.As I said, boot time has reduced significantly and program/file load times are rapid. I'm very happy with my 'new' PC, and hopefully won't need to hit my bank balance for a replacement PC any time soon. Highly recommended upgrade for your PC, and it's also worth checking that you have sufficient RAM as that is just a 10 minute plug and play exercise.

14.10.2018

This is an incredible piece of kit.Let me start by telling you how amazing it is before busting some myths.My PC is a slim desktop Acer X3-710 with an i7 6700 processor and 12gb ram that came with a 2tb hybrid HDD, and AMD R7 340 2gb graphics card all as standard.I installed this, quite easily using ore-existing cables (from disconnecting the old hybrid HDD).I used software to restore an image to this drive.And hey presto. I’m up and running in the space of 2 hours.When I turn my PC on, I’m already at the login page (windows 10) within seconds, enter my password and seconds later at my desktop.I can immediately open heavy programs such as Adobe Bridge, Photoshop etc,whilst my Norton is updating heavily in the background with no delay or pause.Using this drive has given incredible speed and incredible reliability with no noise and also with the temperature of my system a lot cooler and no upgrade was necessary to change this.Now for installation.Install macrium reflect, free version. Create a recovery media disk or usb drive.Then use an external HDD to create an image.Turn the PC off, disconnect the monitor etc, and press and hold the power button to discharge any static.Locate your existing HDD and remove.Install this new SSD on a 2.5” to 3.5” adapater and then put in place of the old HDD.Reconnect everything, and put you USB drive in, or if using a disk, turn the pc on, and put the disk straight in.With the disk it may show as nothing to boot, so just restart and press f12 until you get the boot menu and then boot from the relevant drive, i.e disk or usb.Then macrium will open up, plug in the external HDD and search for the image you created earlier.Click restore image, and ALL partitions.And wait up to 2 hours.Disconnect the external HDD and the usb drive or remove the disk and restart.Hey presto, everything as it is but with a newer and faster SSD.Windows 10 will usually program its settings for SSD but if not these are what you need to do.Make sure TRIM is enabledDisable Superfetch from the services (LEAVE PREFETCH and INDEXING on)Disable defragmentation schedules.That’s it! As easy as that. And the best thing is the macrium reflect is free and much easier to use.As I already said, since changing to this hard drive, running heavy programs, multiple heavy programs, doesn’t cause the drive to run at 100% like it typically would with a hybrid HDD or standard HDD.You do not need to do anything else and do not change any other settings other than the ones I mentioned.The first SSDs you would need to change them, but as technology has advanced very quickly, they have become more durable and stable. In fact I think it’s 50 years of continuous write and reads before this drive goes bust.Just make sure you do regular backup images to an external HDD because if an SSD fails, it will do so without warning!

22.6.2018

I've purchased several of Samsung's previous generation EVO 850 drives over the last couple of years for various PCs and laptops. I've also had great success with all of the drives and never had any problems with any of them.I was looking to purchase a 1 TB Samsung EVO 850 when I noticed that the 860 EVO was now available and was also £40 cheaper so decided to read up a little on the drive before biting the bullet.On paper the 860 EVO has been improved in nearly all areas however the most significant improvement is to the endurance TBW (TeraBytes Written) of the drive's flash memory which has essentially been doubled.In the unlikely event that you would come close to the TBW rating of the 850 EVO in normal daily use then it will take you twice as long with the 860 EVO. The drive also has a newer Samsung MJX controller and additional cache memory which improves the performance of the drive. The 860 also consumes less power than the 850 which should benefit laptop users, if only a slight improvement to battery life.Performance-wise there is very little difference between the 850 and 860, however in my experience so far the 860 is marginally faster, if only by a few MB/s in various benchmarks. The problem is that these drives are already pushing the SATA interface to the limit and no single SATA SSD is really going to perform much better. If you really need much higher performance you need to look at NVMe drives instead as they eliminate the SATA bottleneck, however, older PCs and laptops will not support these types of drive.One thing I noticed with the 860 was that it arrived in a smaller box that the 850 and as a result it doesn't ship with the CD that the 850 comes with. The CD came with the Samsung Magician and Samsung Data Migration software which is really useful if you are planning to clone your drive onto the new SSD and check the health of your Samsung SSDs etc. I would however always recommend downloading the latest version of these programs from Samsung's website if you plan to use them as the ones on the CD are normally a few versions behind. Not to mention that a lot of systems these days don't even have a CD/DVD drive!Is it worth upgrading an 850 EVO with a new 860 EVO of the same capacity? Probably not. But if you are buying an additional drive, replacing a hard disk or upgrading from a smaller capacity SSD then I would definitely recommend buying the 860 over the 850.I'm really impressed with the 1TB 860 EVO from Samsung. They appear to have improved again on what was already a brilliant product in the 850 EVO - I just hope the reliability and durability of the drive lives up to the claims

5.4.2020

In past times I've not been a great fan of Samsung, either in the guise of phones, tablets, laptops, optical disc drives or AV equipment. These ssd however, and the software you can download to better utilise them is very much better.Unpacking them you realise Samsung have made a reasonable attempt to protect your investment. Yes they are bare bones, just the warranty/installation literature and the disk, but time taken to read them and installation isn't a problem. I was able to download the disk cloning 'Data Migration' software from Samsung, install it on the aging operating disk that gave cause to purchase the two of these discs. Cloning the operating disc was a matter of starting up windows,

9.8.2019

Works as you would expect .* QVO drives are much slower than ordinary EVO drives but use clever software to speed everything up, just can't manage really large transfers so fast.* QVO drives don’t last anything like as long as an EVO drive, but should be plenty long enough the average person.* QVO drives should be cheaper because of their slower speed and shorter lifespan.You won't notice any difference between this drive and any other Samsung SSD thanks to some clever caching. Even copying 1TB to the Samsung I am sure it must have slowed down after a while but I didn't notice it. So really as far as performance is concerned this drive is just as fast as any other technology.I am using my drive to store games and 99% of them are just on the drive forever,

16.7.2019

PIC 1: Breathtaking performance after changing switching to 2TB SSD. Speeds of 200/100 R/W Mb/s for small files look good too. firmware, driver, and all the optiomizations were updated and set from Sansung Magician software for SSDs.PIC 2: Tested with external cable USB3.0-to-SATA[1] external benchmark with NTFS to see suitability for external backups[1]. Unfortutunately the SAMSUNG MAGICAN[2] des not recognize drive so no firmware updates or optiomizations are possibly to do to an externally attached drive.PIC 3: Tested with external cable USB3.0-to-SATA[1]. After fully optimized using Samsung Magicial (see EDIT).EXTERNAL USE: BIG IMAGE FILESPerformance is poor.

4.8.2019

Was a little dubious before purchasing, as there is usually too much hype surrounding these types of disks.HOWEVER, cast away any doubt you may have !!Adding one of these units is like upgrading from a nissan micra to a ferrari !!I was about ready to throw my PC in the bin, as the original platter based HDD were getting slower and slower with the frquent windows 10 update ( no issues with Windows 7 ... ) .Given that my machine has an 8 core AMD Black edtion CPU with 32GB ram, this was clearly annoying.It got to the point where it take several minutes to bring up the login screen. Once logged in, the disk drives were going flat out and unresponsive for at least 10 minutes (

24.1.2020

Used this to upgrade my PS4 pro, up from 1tb disk space, and its worked great, it fits inside the console super easy, and has all the right connectors on the drive itself. The PS4 Pro?, was totally fine with all this, its designed so that this procedure is super easy to do, the original one pops right out, the new one, slots right in, with just one little screw, right on the back, the operating system took it all in its stride. All easy enough to do, and it all just fits right in there.The box says its 2tb capacity?, but you never get the full amount any memory promises anyway. On this, it needs the system software adding to this new drive, via a free sony download, from a USB stick,

11.2.2019

I’ve just purchased a new Mac Mini to replace an ageing laptop and due to Apple’s phenomenal upgrade prices I elected to stick with a base 256Gb internal drive for the OS and then run a secondary drive for photos and media. I had a 5400rpm 4Tb Seagate kicking about so I plugged it in to the USB3.0 port and thought, job done. Only it wasn’t.The lag on editing photos was terrible even though I store full res copies on the drive, sometimes it would take 1min to open, make a tweak and then save an image. The beach ball lived pretty much permanently on the screen. I thought at first this is a new machine, it must be a corruption in the library. So I repaired it. No difference.

29.1.2019

I purchased this for a late 2010 MacBook Pro model, that became too slow. After upgrading the RAM in an attempt at quickening up the dying Mac, I researched into the possibility of upgrading the Mac's HDD to an SSD. After purchasing a SATA cable, also from Amazon, and a basic Torx screwdriver set to remove the HDD from its mount, I found it very easy to do. Having never upgraded the hardware in a Mac before, it was a little fiddly, but I managed well enough. I first downloaded a piece of software from the internet called SuperDuper (free), plugged in the new SSD via the SATA usb cable, and copied the current slow HDD to the SSD. After a couple of hours, I turned off the Mac,

16.11.2018

After reading the reviews of this SSD, I decided to attempt to install the hardware myself. Let me say that I am extremely limited in any sort of techie knowledge, so was a little apprehensive of doing it.Firstly, you need to be aware that you need to purchase a SATA to USB adaptor cable to allow you to migrate (copy) your original hard disk data to the SSD, but this can be bought for 5 or 6 pounds.I was going to replace the hard disk in my HP Pavilion g6 laptop.Attach the SSD to the USB port on the laptop via the adaptor cable. Download the Data Migration software from the Samsung site and run the software (extremely straight forward piece of software to run). Have a good book handy as this took 2 hours on my laptop.

8.9.2019

This is such an amazing SSD, it's much faster than my 7200 RPM HDDs (WD black & blue), I'm very happy with it.My PC runs much smoother now and it boots to the desktop very quickly and load everything fast!Also, It made my Forza Horizon 3 loads much quicker and run much smoother (fixed the stuttering problem) + all games and apps run very quickly.I was going to buy NVMe SSD, but:- it runs hotter than SATA SSDs (I live in Saudi Arabia it's hot here in the summer ~45c) and if it runs hot it will throttle.. so I like having the peace of mind that my SSD run cool with a consistent performance- It disables 2 SATA ports for each NVMe drive.- Almost double the price (970 EVO Plus)- Waiting for samsung 4.0 PCIe SSDsJust get a "good" SSD from any "good" company that you like.

28.2.2020

I upgraded my 8 year old HP laptop HD to this SSD.Now clearly I expected it to be faster but wow!!! Ot far exceeded my expectations. I timed Windows 10 load time as 21 seconds. And this includes me typing the password on the login screen right through to a useable desktop with all background apps loaded. Prior to this my laptop took several minutes to reach login and the several minutes to load the desktop.This is on an old laptop with a slower SATA 2 bus. This SSD is SATA 3 and will go even faster in a computer with a SATA 3 Bus. A Sata bus is the way data moves from the ssd to the computer. If you think of data (memory) as cars and the bus as a motorway, a SATA 2 bus has 2 lanes for traffic while a SATA 3 has 3 lanes.

2.10.2019

Picked this up for my PlayStation, it's a must have. Playing certain games on the supplied HDD made using the menus and multitasking nearly impossible, the same with saving video clips. With this new SSD I can play very demanding games, download 3 games simultaneously, play Spotify and still be able to browse the PS Store and purchase other games at the same time.Another major buying point for me was Graphic Streaming, in some new titles like The Division 2 the graphics struggled to stream in a decent enough time, sometimes leaving you waiting upwards of 30 seconds for the process to complete. Using this SSD I haven't noticed this issue at all, everything's streamed in before you get there.Loading times are also shorter on certain games.

24.7.2018

As a replacement boot drive, on my Samsung RF711 i7 laptop with Windows 7, the SSD is amazing. The boot up time is measured in seconds rather than minutes. I opted for this SSD in preference the cheaper Crucial as a reviewer suggested the cloning was simpler, but this did not prove to be the case.I connected the SSD in a spare drive and Windows automatically loaded two drivers. Unexpectedly, clicking on Computer did not reveal the new drive.I downloaded Samsung Magician as prescribed and although it recognised the drive and it validity it did not provide any links for cloning.I searched the Samsung website and found their data migration application, Clonix Co. Ltd, which I downloaded and ran.

Samsung 860 QVO - Reviews

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