Samsung 850 EVO 250GB mSATA Internal Solid State Drive (MZ-M5E250BW) - Fast & Reliable SSD for Laptops, Gaming PCs & Workstations

I'm very pleased with this Samsung 850 ECO 250GB mSATA SSD from Samsung. I got it to upgrade a notebook computer for a client in my IT practice. I also took the opportunity to run a little performance testing. It did well.I used crystaldiskmark to benchmark drive performance. It tests with and without command queuing. Since all current operating systems I use (Windows 7 and later, Linux and Mac) all enable command queuing by default I'll focus on those results.The drive does great with sequential reads/writes. I got reads of about 550MB/s and writes of about 512MB/s. Most SSD drives do fairly well on sequential read/write operations and this drive is only about 10% queued vs unqueued.This 850 EVO drive did better than many other drives with random reads at about 300MB/s and writes at about 251MB/s. Unqueued reads were about 32MB/S (almost 1/10th the queued rate!) and writes were about 79MB/s (about 1/3 the queued rate). Command queuing makes a big difference with random access and makes this drive stand out for this use.The mSATA form factor provides a SSD that is very compact compared to 2.5in drives. It has the same 6Gb/s data rate limit as 2.5in SATA drives. Other than size, connector or weight these are just like those physically larger drives SATA SSD drives. You can just stick SATA connector on this drive - it won't fit. If you want to use one of these in place of a 2.5in or 3.5in drive you'll need an adapter.There is another kind of SSD that looks a lot like a mSATA and can be easily confused with it. The M.2 drive (aka NGFF form factor) uses a PCI-Express interface instead of SATA. M.2 drives are not at all compatible or interchangeable with mSATA! These are not limited by the SATA data rate bottleneck and if you have a compatible interface they can be MUCH faster than a SATA SSD!In conclusion, this 850 mSATA is one of the faster SATA SSD drives ones I've used, especially on random reads/writes with queuing enabled. If your computer takes this form factor this is a great SSD. If you are replacing a 2.5in hard drive or SSD this is NOT a good choice: get the 2.5in version of this SSD!This drive was perfect for this upgrade for my client. The laptop has both a 2.5in and mSATA bays making cloning very easy and quick. The old mechanical drive is now retired and their previously fairly fast laptop now just flies! With this sort of result I love this upgrade and drive. Definitely 5 stars.