What is the best 1TB class SSD drive?

I agree that the Samsung 850 EVO is likely a pretty good contender in the SSD world. Sure, it is TLC but has double the rated endurance of the 840 EVO series. If it is anything like the 850 PRO, it is probably way better than its rating. I have seen some claims of abuse/torture tests on the 128GB version of the 850 PRO where it has withstood 62,000 P/E cycles and still going strong when it is only rated and guranteed to withstand 6,000 P/E cycles. The earlier MLC and TLC drives tended to go to about 2-3x their rated P/E cycles before complete failure with errors beginning to show at about 2x the rating. That isn't bad. If this holds true for the 850 EVO, we should expect 4,000-6,000 PE cycles although I wouldn't be surprised if it might exceed that.

From what I have read, that 850 PRO is pretty much the best of the best. There are some enterprise rated units but understand a lot of that is marketing and that Samsung artificially rates the 850 PRO low to create a market for more expensive drives. I understand that some of PCI-E direct connect drives are many times faster but they are also costly and won't fit into most laptops. So the 850 Pro is the cream of the crop when it comes to SSDs that plug into a SATA 3.0 bus.

We all know Samsung has some good offerings, but how about others in the 1TB range? I see the Crucial BX200 or whatever scores pretty well?. The 1TB range used to only contain a handful of drives and now there are a ton to choose from. The price difference between the lesser known ones and the Samsung 850 PRO is narrowing. Also, the overall price has dropped like a rock.

I kinda like buying a drive where the controller, NAND flash, and all is designed and built from top to bottom by the same manufacturer like Crucial or Samsung. I am not knocking SandForce drives although some of the lower end ones seem to be based on the controller but it isn't uncommon for one to have minor issues with firmware and such.

Was to pull back to the 480 to 512GB drives and pocket the cash for another day.
Bob

Having a fast and large capacity SSD can bring processing times down from a week or more to overnight or so. I monitor the SATA port bandwidth and see at sustained at max for hours on end. Sometimes large GIS datasets can be several hundred gigs and a 1TB SSD can still seem cramped!

At the office we boosted such a query machine to 32GB RAM. That helped immensely. Here's an article about RAM and SSD effects.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ram-endurance,3475.html

Bob

RAM works wonders. It is too bad but most laptops still max out at 16GB but the more the merrier when it comes to a desktop.