Swapping out your hard drive for a solid state drive is one of the best ways to improve overall performance. This can often come at the expense of capacity, unless you splurge on a 1TB SSD. To take the sting out of doing that, Samsung’s 850 Evo in 1TB form is currently on sale for $290.
That makes it competitive with other 1TB SSD options, such as WD’s Blue and SanDisk’s Ultra 3D, the latter of which is $10 cheaper. What we like about Samsung’s 850 Evo line, however, is that it outperforms more expensive SSDs. That’s a big reason why we list the 500GB model as our top pick.
The 850 Evo uses vertically arranged 3D NAND flash memory, which it combines with its own controller. Samsung rates the 1TB model to deliver up to 540MB/s of sequential read and up to 520MB/s of sequential write performance. In our testing, those figures are fairly accurate.
Those numbers pale in comparison to newer M.2 form factor NVMe SSDs that tap into the PCIe bus, though unless you’re doing some heavy file lifting, you’re not going to notice much of a difference. SATA-based SSDs are still plenty fast.
Both Amazon and Newegg have the 1TB SSD on sale. Other capacities are also marked down, though the savings aren’t quite as great.