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Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)
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Customer reviews
- Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)
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- Customer reviews
Top positive review
Works perfectly as an external boot drive for my Late 2012 iMac
January 28, 2018
The hard drive in my Late 2012 iMac is starting to die. Since the hard drives in iMacs are not user accessible (at least not without major surgery), I decided to use an external drive as my boot and system drive. I bought this drive, and the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212) to house it. I put the drive in the HighPoint, plugged everything in, then...
Booted to recovery mode (Command-R at boot chime).
Reformatted the disk to HFS+ journaled (with GUID partition map).
Reinstalled MacOS.
Once MacOS was installed, I followed the prompts to migrate data from a Time Machine backup (Users, Documents, etc. I clicked all the options).
Everything is up and running great! During the OS install process, the drive format was changed to APFS (instead of HFS+) since I'm running High Sierra.
Lastly, I went into System Preferences and turned on FileVault (which is still running in the background and will probably take another day or two).
The best part: Now my 2012 iMac is even faster than the day it was brand new!
Link to the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212): HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212)
Booted to recovery mode (Command-R at boot chime).
Reformatted the disk to HFS+ journaled (with GUID partition map).
Reinstalled MacOS.
Once MacOS was installed, I followed the prompts to migrate data from a Time Machine backup (Users, Documents, etc. I clicked all the options).
Everything is up and running great! During the OS install process, the drive format was changed to APFS (instead of HFS+) since I'm running High Sierra.
Lastly, I went into System Preferences and turned on FileVault (which is still running in the background and will probably take another day or two).
The best part: Now my 2012 iMac is even faster than the day it was brand new!
Link to the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212): HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212)
205 people found this helpful
Top critical review
Warning! Defective Items are being shipped with July 2018 releases
August 23, 2018
I ordered a hard disk and tested through the Crystal Disk benchmark. It was only giving 50% less speeds than specifications. I have a 5 yr old Samsung SSD with same operating system which was reading above 500MB/S for the sequential test. I have run the same test with another Samsung SSD 850 EVO, which also gave above 500MB/s. I made sure that all the parameters are same for different SSDs.
I got a replacement disk from amazon and it turned to be defective as well. I tried one from Best Buy released in the same month and discovered the same. Samsung's Quality testing has gone downhill and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling so many defective units.
Before a person from Samsung replies to my comment, they should also note that I have already contacted Samsung and they said the issue can't be fixed and to return the drive.
I got a replacement disk from amazon and it turned to be defective as well. I tried one from Best Buy released in the same month and discovered the same. Samsung's Quality testing has gone downhill and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling so many defective units.
Before a person from Samsung replies to my comment, they should also note that I have already contacted Samsung and they said the issue can't be fixed and to return the drive.
313 people found this helpful
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Showing 1-10 of 3,591 reviews
August 23, 2018
I ordered a hard disk and tested through the Crystal Disk benchmark. It was only giving 50% less speeds than specifications. I have a 5 yr old Samsung SSD with same operating system which was reading above 500MB/S for the sequential test. I have run the same test with another Samsung SSD 850 EVO, which also gave above 500MB/s. I made sure that all the parameters are same for different SSDs.
I got a replacement disk from amazon and it turned to be defective as well. I tried one from Best Buy released in the same month and discovered the same. Samsung's Quality testing has gone downhill and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling so many defective units.
Before a person from Samsung replies to my comment, they should also note that I have already contacted Samsung and they said the issue can't be fixed and to return the drive.
I got a replacement disk from amazon and it turned to be defective as well. I tried one from Best Buy released in the same month and discovered the same. Samsung's Quality testing has gone downhill and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling so many defective units.
Before a person from Samsung replies to my comment, they should also note that I have already contacted Samsung and they said the issue can't be fixed and to return the drive.
January 28, 2018
The hard drive in my Late 2012 iMac is starting to die. Since the hard drives in iMacs are not user accessible (at least not without major surgery), I decided to use an external drive as my boot and system drive. I bought this drive, and the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212) to house it. I put the drive in the HighPoint, plugged everything in, then...
Booted to recovery mode (Command-R at boot chime).
Reformatted the disk to HFS+ journaled (with GUID partition map).
Reinstalled MacOS.
Once MacOS was installed, I followed the prompts to migrate data from a Time Machine backup (Users, Documents, etc. I clicked all the options).
Everything is up and running great! During the OS install process, the drive format was changed to APFS (instead of HFS+) since I'm running High Sierra.
Lastly, I went into System Preferences and turned on FileVault (which is still running in the background and will probably take another day or two).
The best part: Now my 2012 iMac is even faster than the day it was brand new!
Link to the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212): HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212)
Booted to recovery mode (Command-R at boot chime).
Reformatted the disk to HFS+ journaled (with GUID partition map).
Reinstalled MacOS.
Once MacOS was installed, I followed the prompts to migrate data from a Time Machine backup (Users, Documents, etc. I clicked all the options).
Everything is up and running great! During the OS install process, the drive format was changed to APFS (instead of HFS+) since I'm running High Sierra.
Lastly, I went into System Preferences and turned on FileVault (which is still running in the background and will probably take another day or two).
The best part: Now my 2012 iMac is even faster than the day it was brand new!
Link to the HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212): HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt 10Gbps Storage Dock (RocketStor 5212)
March 4, 2018
I have a nearly 9 year old CyberPower desktop with an Asus P6T Motherboard and wanted to eliminate a potential point of failure to eek out a little more longevity. And if I got some enhanced performance, all the better. Turns out it was a very good move.
Of course the order came within the two day Prime window which one expects from Amazon. I also got the Corsair Dual SSD Mounting Bracket
that was an order option for another 6 bucks. I reviewed it separately but it's a must have if you are installing into a 5 1/2 inch bay like I was. The SSD comes with an Installation Guide, which I didn't need other than to follow a web site link provided in order to install the Samsung Data Migration Software and Samsung Magician Software. Since I was installing the SSD to replace my C System drive, I needed to clone that drive onto the SSD. And the Data Migrations software works perfectly. After formatting the SSD (NTSF), I cloned 232GB to the SSD in just 31 min with a SATA 3.0 to SATA 3.0 connection. It would have been much faster has my PC supported SATA 6.0. Then removed the HDD and installed the SSD into the mounting bracket, connected the SSD to the SATA data cable and power cable (I used the same port as the C drive HDD was connected to), powered the PC up and it booted hassle free, with no issues. It was indeed a perfect clone of the previous drive. There was no issues that required going into the BIOS screen. This will only be an issue if you do not use the same exact SATA data connection that was attached to your former C system drive.
I'm amazed how much faster the drive is. The Magician software not only carves out a bit of the drive for overhead, but it also has a cool performance test you can run on all installed drives. So I ran it on the SSD and a 6 TB WD HDD dedicated to pictures and the Random IOPS results were: for the SSD 8,789 read and 19,775 write vs for the HDD 178 read and 244 write. While that may sound unbelievable, it isn't. You actually experience this speed differential while working on the PC.
This was definitely $150 well spent!
Of course the order came within the two day Prime window which one expects from Amazon. I also got the Corsair Dual SSD Mounting Bracket
that was an order option for another 6 bucks. I reviewed it separately but it's a must have if you are installing into a 5 1/2 inch bay like I was. The SSD comes with an Installation Guide, which I didn't need other than to follow a web site link provided in order to install the Samsung Data Migration Software and Samsung Magician Software. Since I was installing the SSD to replace my C System drive, I needed to clone that drive onto the SSD. And the Data Migrations software works perfectly. After formatting the SSD (NTSF), I cloned 232GB to the SSD in just 31 min with a SATA 3.0 to SATA 3.0 connection. It would have been much faster has my PC supported SATA 6.0. Then removed the HDD and installed the SSD into the mounting bracket, connected the SSD to the SATA data cable and power cable (I used the same port as the C drive HDD was connected to), powered the PC up and it booted hassle free, with no issues. It was indeed a perfect clone of the previous drive. There was no issues that required going into the BIOS screen. This will only be an issue if you do not use the same exact SATA data connection that was attached to your former C system drive.
I'm amazed how much faster the drive is. The Magician software not only carves out a bit of the drive for overhead, but it also has a cool performance test you can run on all installed drives. So I ran it on the SSD and a 6 TB WD HDD dedicated to pictures and the Random IOPS results were: for the SSD 8,789 read and 19,775 write vs for the HDD 178 read and 244 write. While that may sound unbelievable, it isn't. You actually experience this speed differential while working on the PC.
This was definitely $150 well spent!
May 31, 2018
It used to be that adding RAM was the easiest and cheapest way to speed up a slow computer. That never addressed the real bottleneck of a computer, which is the hard drive. I had a customer complaining that they probably needed a new computer even though theirs was only a little over a year old. Knowing that they had a standard platter-style hard drive, I suggested this. Boy is she glad that I did! Saved her hundreds of dollars on a new computer and likely thousands on lost time waiting for her computer to 'compute' as her entire business relies on her computer to make her money.
January 25, 2018
The drive performs fantastically. It truly is a successor to the 850 Evo. I purchased this drive to upgrade my laptop, and right off the bat I noticed a huge improvement. Boot to desktop was about 7 seconds. Would absolutely buy again.
Edit: For any of those curious, the specs of my laptop are as follows:
I7-3632qm Ivy Bridge @ 2.2Ghz
16gb 1600Mhz RAM
Radeon HD 7670M GPU
Samsung 250gb 860 Evo
On a side note, if you are looking to upgrade a laptop and use this drive as your main drive and are looking for a more straight forward approach, cloning your current drive over to the new SSD is fairly straight forward.
I purchased a Started USB 3.0 to 2.5" drive converter for roughly $10 in conjunction with Macrium Reflect Free for this, and it worked perfectly with this drive. The software is super simple to use and is fully compatible with this SSD.
UPDATE: After installing the "Samsung Magician" software and enabling "Rapid Mode," the performance of this drive has increased drastically. The second picture shows the increase from the base performance.
Edit: For any of those curious, the specs of my laptop are as follows:
I7-3632qm Ivy Bridge @ 2.2Ghz
16gb 1600Mhz RAM
Radeon HD 7670M GPU
Samsung 250gb 860 Evo
On a side note, if you are looking to upgrade a laptop and use this drive as your main drive and are looking for a more straight forward approach, cloning your current drive over to the new SSD is fairly straight forward.
I purchased a Started USB 3.0 to 2.5" drive converter for roughly $10 in conjunction with Macrium Reflect Free for this, and it worked perfectly with this drive. The software is super simple to use and is fully compatible with this SSD.
UPDATE: After installing the "Samsung Magician" software and enabling "Rapid Mode," the performance of this drive has increased drastically. The second picture shows the increase from the base performance.
September 17, 2018
I have an HP Z600 computer. I had to update the BIOS in order for the Samsung Magician Software to recognize the new drive. But I still couldn't see it in Windows Explorer since it wasn't formatted. Took a while to discover the fix:
In Windows 10, open Windows Explorer, click THIS PC from the left column, then click MANAGE from the upper menu. A new window will open called Computer Management. In the left column, click DISK MANAGEMENT. The new drive should appear there. Since it hasn't been formatted, it doesn't show up in Windows Explorer just yet. The new drive should say "unallocated".
Right click on the new drive from the menu below. Select NEW SIMPLE VOLUME. A new window titled Welcome To The New Simple Volume Wizard. Click NEXT. Don't change any of the disk size or space defaults that show up, click NEXT. In the next window, you can assign a drive letter. Click NEXT. The next window allows you to assign a Volume Label (drive name). I called mine 1TB SSD. Click NEXT. A new window will show you what is about to happen, click FINISH.
In a few moments, the formatting of the new drive will be complete. Open Windows Explorer, your new drive should show up.
Now you can run the Samsung Data Migration software if you are swapping out your primary drive. This will detect the original drive, and the new SSD drive. If you need to pick a different drive to copy, the menu makes it easy. When ready, run the transfer. Mine took about 20 minutes. It then prompted me to shutdown the computer, remove the C drive, and put the SSD in its place. After that was done, I booted the machine and it started just like nothing had changed. The speed improved, and all my programs are working. I kept the older drive as an archive if this one fails.
Hopefully these details will save you a few frustrating hours of getting the new drive to work. It definitely wasn't a plug & play operation, but ultimately was worth the trouble. Took a star off because of the effort to install it.
In Windows 10, open Windows Explorer, click THIS PC from the left column, then click MANAGE from the upper menu. A new window will open called Computer Management. In the left column, click DISK MANAGEMENT. The new drive should appear there. Since it hasn't been formatted, it doesn't show up in Windows Explorer just yet. The new drive should say "unallocated".
Right click on the new drive from the menu below. Select NEW SIMPLE VOLUME. A new window titled Welcome To The New Simple Volume Wizard. Click NEXT. Don't change any of the disk size or space defaults that show up, click NEXT. In the next window, you can assign a drive letter. Click NEXT. The next window allows you to assign a Volume Label (drive name). I called mine 1TB SSD. Click NEXT. A new window will show you what is about to happen, click FINISH.
In a few moments, the formatting of the new drive will be complete. Open Windows Explorer, your new drive should show up.
Now you can run the Samsung Data Migration software if you are swapping out your primary drive. This will detect the original drive, and the new SSD drive. If you need to pick a different drive to copy, the menu makes it easy. When ready, run the transfer. Mine took about 20 minutes. It then prompted me to shutdown the computer, remove the C drive, and put the SSD in its place. After that was done, I booted the machine and it started just like nothing had changed. The speed improved, and all my programs are working. I kept the older drive as an archive if this one fails.
Hopefully these details will save you a few frustrating hours of getting the new drive to work. It definitely wasn't a plug & play operation, but ultimately was worth the trouble. Took a star off because of the effort to install it.
September 14, 2018
First - get this! I was about to hold a funeral for my aging tower system. It has a reasonable quad-core CPU, I packed all the memory it holds, got a GPU, bought new and faster drives, and put the operating system and applications on their own drive. The boot time and constant lag were killing me. Then I saw this.
My only problem was that the instruction booklet and multiple help sites told me to run Magician which did nothing for me whatsoever.I ended up calling Samsung Support (very good support).
This is what he told me:
-- install the drive - I got the Corsair mount. Then just plug in power and SATA cables.
-- boot your computer
-- google samsung.com data migration
-- download the Data Migration file and run it.
The Data Migration program runs until it's done. Shutdown and unplug/remove your old C: drive. I put the C:\ SATA cable from my old drive to the SSD drive (I had to put the one used for installation back in my CD drive.
-- boot your system. It will boot to the MUCH faster SSD.
-- Go back to the page you downloaded Data Migration from and download Magician.
-- Run Benchmark and Performance Optimize then RAPID.
I used the SSD for my operating system and Application files - any engine stuff. I left my mountains of data, pictures, art, music, etc. on the spinning disk drive they were on in the first place.
Voila! Your system lives again. Mine now boots in less than 1 minute, then it runs all my programs much faster the better.
My only problem was that the instruction booklet and multiple help sites told me to run Magician which did nothing for me whatsoever.I ended up calling Samsung Support (very good support).
This is what he told me:
-- install the drive - I got the Corsair mount. Then just plug in power and SATA cables.
-- boot your computer
-- google samsung.com data migration
-- download the Data Migration file and run it.
The Data Migration program runs until it's done. Shutdown and unplug/remove your old C: drive. I put the C:\ SATA cable from my old drive to the SSD drive (I had to put the one used for installation back in my CD drive.
-- boot your system. It will boot to the MUCH faster SSD.
-- Go back to the page you downloaded Data Migration from and download Magician.
-- Run Benchmark and Performance Optimize then RAPID.
I used the SSD for my operating system and Application files - any engine stuff. I left my mountains of data, pictures, art, music, etc. on the spinning disk drive they were on in the first place.
Voila! Your system lives again. Mine now boots in less than 1 minute, then it runs all my programs much faster the better.
February 24, 2018
I've had 5 Samsung 850s and love them, never had a problem, and I know this experience is pretty rare. This drive though didn't even make it 6 days before the read/write failures filled up the win event log. The constant need to retry reads/writes made it impossible to even get the data off the disk once failure was observed.
I'm not saying you should avoid this product; I believe in Samsung SSD drives. This particular drive failed though. Take that for what it's worth.
I'm not saying you should avoid this product; I believe in Samsung SSD drives. This particular drive failed though. Take that for what it's worth.
