The Best Of Both Worlds: Samsung Announces Mammoth 4TB 850 EVO Solid-state Drive

When solid-state drives first hit the scene a number of years ago, mechanical hard drive companies had nothing to fear: the storage space just wasn’t there. The most popular SSDs out of the gate hovered around the ~80GB mark, so clearly, they were best-suited for the operating system and applications – not much else. Since then, though, things have begun to change, and that change is beginning to speed up.

Announced today, Samsung has a new SSD that will suit those who demand fast I/O speeds but also require high densities – for whatever reason. That drive is the 4TB 850 EVO, a SATA 6Gbps drive that can hold about “1,000 two-hour compressed 1080p full-length movies”. That’s a bit of an odd (official) stat, but is there any doubt that some folks with deep pockets will pick these up for that exact use?

Oh right… about that “deep pockets” thing. As you’d expect from a 4,000 GB SSD, this one isn’t going to come cheap, so if you really, really want one, prepare to shell out $1,499.99 USD for it. To be fair, it’s not $1,500.00, so Samsung probably pushed hard to keep the drive as inexpensive as possible.

Samsung clocks its 4TB 850 EVO at 540MB/s read and 520MB/s write, which is on par with other high-end SATA drives. No word on IOPS performance is given, but we do know that the drive will be durable: it can endure at least 300TB written, and includes a five-year warranty to give you the confidence that it will actually last you a little while.

Samsung says that the drive will become available in over 50 countries, including the US, Korea, China, and Europe. Release date? The end of the month!