Samsung is one of the biggest names when it comes to storage. While most other companies have to buy components such as controllers and NAND memory chips from various suppliers, Samsung produces everything itself. This gives Samsung a distinct advantage in several ways and makes the company stand out among a sea of available drive manufacturers.
Store your data in the 1TB 860 EVO SATA III 2.5' Internal SSD from Samsung for quick access. It features sequential read speeds of up to 550 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 520 MB/s, making it ideal for storing and rendering large format files such as 4K video and 3D data.
The 850 EVO uses the 3D V-NAND technology that gives it a higher data density than many other drives and provides it with a slight advantage in performance. This 2.5-inch drive has an extremely slim 7mm profile that allows it to slide into a wide range of laptops that happen to have thin profiles.
The drive is thin enough to stack several of them in a desktop system.
Yes you can use a Samsung 850 EVO 2.5' SSD in your system swapping out your current HD. Follow this IFIXIT guide: To make this easy get either a USB or FireWire (being faster) external case to hold your new SSD so you can prep it up. Next you'll want to download from the App store the OS installer.
First you'll want to use Disk Utility to create a GUID partition map and a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition on your new SSD. Now run the OS installer and install the OS onto your new SSD. At the end of the OS install process the installer will ask you if you want to migrate your user accounts, apps & data over point to your current HD and all of your stuff will be copied over.
The last step is to swap out your drives and thats it! I use the 2012 model's cable in the 2010 & 11 systems as it's the same part but a better design. If you had both cables you would see some design differences between the two cables (thickness) the extra effort was due to the higher data rate the SSD drives can put through Think like how a car runs on a dirt road Vs a paved highway. The car can run on either, but would be limited on how fast on the dirt road and would pickup a lot of dust in the process. HDD's data throughput is still less then what SSD's can put out so the design of the SATA cable needs to be optimized for the higher throughput which the newer designed cable offers. Even still I always apply some electricians tape onto the uppercase when the cable rests to help isolate it from the rough aluminum so it does not abrade. The limits of the systems SATA port is the issue so if you have a SATA III interface in your system it will run the Samsung at SSD SATA III (6.0 GB/s).
The 2011 models do have an issue within the optical drive SATA port so it can mess things up if this port is the startup drive with a SATA III drive. Yes, you can use it.
All SATA based systems can support a SATA SSD. The only issue you face is the systems SATA I/O speed and the speed of the SSD. In this case the Samsung 850 EVO SSD is an auto sense drive so it will match the systems SATA port's I/O speed! Not all SSD's do this so if you have a slower I/O speed system i.e.
SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) a newer fixed speed drive i.e. SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) won't work. Bottomline: Review the drives spec sheet to make sure it supports the SATA speed of your system. As an example Note the Interface line, what ever drive you get needs to support what your system uses.