A new breed of SSDs is born
Solid state drives are starting to feel like a dime a dozen, but don't mistake Samsung's newest line for just another ordinary SSD. Samsung's 850 Pro is the first SSD to sport the company's cutting-edge 3D vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. In case you've never heard of V-NAND, it features a proprietary vertical cell structure that overcomes the density limit currently facing planar NAND architecture.

"With the new 850 Pro V-NAND SSD, Samsung is introducing the next major evolution of SSD technology, taking the lead in delivering high-density SSDs with outstanding endurance, performance and energy efficiency," said Unsoo Kim, senior vice president of branded product marketing team at Samsung Electronics. "We are fully committed to establishing an innovative computing environment by providing customers with leading-edge V-NAND SSDs with unrivaled performance."

Samsung also baked in a technology called Dynamic Thermal Guard. This makes the drive maintain ambient temperature while operating to guard against the possibility of data loss due to overheating.

In terms of performance, the 850 Pro offers sequential read transfers of up to 550MB/s, sequential write transfers of up to 520MB/s, random read performance of up to 100,000 IOPS, and random write speeds of up to 90,000 IOPS.

Samsung's 850 Pro SSDs will come in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities. No word yet on price or availability.