Reviews - Samsung SSD 840 EVO (120GB)

[HEXUS]

Small drive, big performance.

Read more.

[3dcandy]

excellent performance for £87. Deffo looking at these for my next SSD purchase

[ConnorLowe]

I've been looking for a suitable SSD for when I upgrade my system in the upcoming months. Looks like I've found a winner!

[Terbinator]

How does RAPID mode scale with system RAM speed? 2400MHz RAM in the test kit is way above what most people are running - assuming 1600MHz is the general speed.

Also, dat' RAPID RAID. Does this still work if your run in '0' with one logical drive?

[stevie lee]

hope they've written into the TURBO software to delay system restarts/shutdowns until the cache has finished writing.

does it also work when its plugged into a SATA 3Gbps port?
not everyone has upgraded to this new fancy SATA 6Gbps tech yet. theres still us oldies who use 4 year old computers who don't feel the need to upgrade chipsets yet.

[Odeas]

Been looking to upgrade my 70gb ssd and this looks ideal.

[PMM]

This to me is just a marketing gimmick to confuse average consumer, the benchmarks are deciving as your benchmarking the system cache on the computer not really the drive itself.(Yes software cacheing can help computer performance) but you can't make the drive go faster that it can by deploying software it still going to be capped at 540Mb/s reads and 90K iops and that seems to tell in the IOmeter reults as it looks like its fighting the drive so potentially extra overhead determining is the data in cache or is the drive needed to be used. you could buy any SSD drive find your self a software caching system and get these type results or better as your seeing the results of the cache more than the results of the SSD. I think I prefer raw unmessed results of the drive itself. I know if I seen a benchmark showing 1000Mb/s reads when the sata port can only peak at under 600MB/s (Its limitation) I know its a pot of crock and I would not even entertain the purchase of that brand.

[KrisWragg]

I assume the RAPID is only available for Windows?

Although you can get similar caching using filesystems like ZFS on linux which can be used with any hard drive / SSD setup.

[3dcandy]

This to me is just a marketing gimmick to confuse average consumer, the benchmarks are deciving as your benchmarking the system cache on the computer not really the drive itself.(Yes software cacheing can help computer performance) but you can't make the drive go faster that it can by deploying software it still going to be capped at 540Mb/s reads and 90K iops and that seems to tell in the IOmeter reults as it looks like its fighting the drive so potentially extra overhead determining is the data in cache or is the drive needed to be used. you could buy any SSD drive find your self a software caching system and get these type results or better as your seeing the results of the cache more than the results of the SSD. I think I prefer raw unmessed results of the drive itself. I know if I seen a benchmark showing 1000Mb/s reads when the sata port can only peak at under 600MB/s (Its limitation) I know its a pot of crock and I would not even entertain the purchase of that brand.

Whooaaaaa - so you're overlooking the other aspects too? It's a pretty quick drive for the price and you don't have to install the extra software, but many people would love to get that performance in their systems for that price. It's a technology at the heart of many things including cache system on motherboards too - so the fact it's just a software download will interest many. As the review says they're not that bothered about the technology but it's still a solid drive without the software...

[YazX]

MLC NAND, no thanks.

[YazX]

meant TLC NAND, sorry!

[crossy]

Also, dat' RAPID RAID. Does this still work if your run in '0' with one logical drive?

I assume the RAPID is only available for Windows?

Article says

The technology currently only supports the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems, and the host PC needs to meet a minimum set of requirements; 1GHz CPU; NTFS file system; at least 2GB of RAM. And even then, users will be restricted to using RAPID Mode on a single drive - it won't currently service any other 840 EVO SSDs in the system, and RAID configurations are a no-go.

So yes, Windows only and single physical drive.

Although you can get similar caching using filesystems like ZFS on linux which can be used with any hard drive / SSD setup.

Take that Windows!
I moved by Ubuntu 12.04LTS system (that's this one I'm using now) from pretty decent (ie expensive) HDD to Samsung 830 SSD at the end of last year and I've had no cause to regret it. Boot up is lightning fast and everything is just so snappy - e.g. even 'apt-get update' which seemed to take an age moves at a good lick.

This to me is just a marketing gimmick to confuse average consumer, the benchmarks are deciving as your benchmarking the system cache on the computer not really the drive itself.(Yes software cacheing can help computer performance) but you can't make the drive go faster that it can by deploying software it still going to be capped at 540Mb/s reads and 90K iops and that seems to tell in the IOmeter reults as it looks like its fighting the drive so potentially extra overhead determining is the data in cache or is the drive needed to be used. you could buy any SSD drive find your self a software caching system and get these type results or better as your seeing the results of the cache more than the results of the SSD. I think I prefer raw unmessed results of the drive itself. I know if I seen a benchmark showing 1000Mb/s reads when the sata port can only peak at under 600MB/s (Its limitation) I know its a pot of crock and I would not even entertain the purchase of that brand.

What are you smoking? Hexus HAVE put in the un-RAPID'd results in there. And to be honest anyone who just looks at the RAPID'd "headline figure" is a prat. Looking at the normal figures seems to show that the EVO is a pretty solid piece of kit - able to keep pace with the PRO drives. Only test it does "badly" at is IOMETER which, as Hexus points out, is always going to favour the business drives over prosumer kit like the 840's. That said, I just checked Overclock and if they had Intel 520's in stock then they'd be about the same price as the equivalent 840 EVO. If you want another view then check out this review by The SSD Review which is similarly pretty positive - heck, the reviewer subsequently went out and bought an EVO for his own system, which surely is the ultimate accolade.

I've got a couple of the older 830 drives and they've been pretty darned good. Now I'm thinking I'd like to migrate my app partition (256MB) from "spinning rust" to something a little faster - any idea what the actual capacity of the 250MB drive is? Although I'm still thinking that the 256MB PRO drive might be a better idea.

[lowers93]

Isn't "TurboWrite" basically the same as what sandisk were already doing with "nCache"?

[Myss_tree]

I like that the price of going from a lower capacity drive (in GB's) no longer seems to invoke a doubling of price plus an extra percentage on top of that double price.

[hahcore]

promising performance considering the price

[superlattice09]

very good performance and great price