Samsung SSD 840 Pro (256GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 24, 2012 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Samsung
- Samsung SSD 840
Final Words
The performance and power characteristics of Samsung's SSD 840 Pro are as close to perfect as we've seen from any drive this generation. In all but a handful of benchmarks, the 840 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we've ever tested. Even more important than its industry leading performance is the fact that the 840 Pro delivers great performance while remaining one of the lowest power SSDs to make it through our labs. Assuming the premature death of our review sample was a fluke and not indicative of a bigger issue, the 840 Pro could be the first drive in quite a while to offer the absolute best performance at power consumption levels that are notebook friendly. Update: Our replacement 840 Pro also died prematurely, I'd recommend holding off any purchases until we hear back from Samsung as to the cause of death. Update 2: It looks like this may have been a firmware issue. Retail drives should ship with fixed firmware.
The 830 proved quite reliable, so as long as Samsung can guarantee similar levels of compatibility and reliability out of the 840 Pro it looks to have a real winner on its hands.
The vanilla 840 is super interesting. We've never tested a 3bpc MLC drive in house, and although Samsung isn't promising huge cost savings initially - over time the move to 3bpc MLC will aggressively drive mainstream SSD prices down.
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B3an - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
When will you guys have the 840 Pro added to Bench?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Here you go: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/665hrrmph - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
On the recent SSD reviews, thanks for taking the time to let us know about the tool box utilities!!
After years of using OCZ, I just deployed my first Intel 520 a month ago. It's a solid 'no hiccup' performer so far.
Now that the 840 Pro makes Samsung competitive with the best SSDs on performance, warranty, and utilities, I look forward to trying it out.
I particularly like the idea of being able to use the Samsung Magician software to set the spare area. All of my machines have other drives for bulk data, so being able to allocate some unused space on the SSD for use as spare area seems logical.
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zer0sum - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
Why are some SSD tests on AT being run with Z68, 2500k @ 3.3ghz with turbo and EIST enabled, 1600Mhz ram, and then this one with H67, 2600k @ 3.4 with turbo and EIST disabled, and 1333Mhz ram?Does this effect performance in any of the tests?
Per Hansson - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
It very well might, EIST has been known to cause problems for SSD's in the past.Also would be very interesting to hear Anands thoughts on the power consumption concerns raised above (DIPM: Device Initiated Power Management)
Per Hansson - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
A quick Google shows the first link to Anandtech's own forums, and a quite good confirmation that EIST affects performance by a quite noticeable margin!http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=eist+ss...
zer0sum - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
Ok, I had lower than expected 4k write scores with my 3570k @4.5ghz, using EIST and turbo mode so I went with some advice and ran a single thread of prime95 whilst doing an AS-SSD run.Big difference!!
http://www.overclock.net/t/1242088/official-vertex...
mr. president - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
Nice review. I'd still want to see more 'exotic' use cases tested and especially ones that test garbage collection where TRIM isn't available.ZiL ZFS and software RAID spring to mind. Or, from a more consumer oriented standpoint, the PS3 can benefit from an SSD but it has no TRIM support.
serpretetsky - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
"Assuming the premature death of our review sample was a fluke and not indicative of a bigger issue,"Care to elaborate on this? It simply failed after you guys ran all the tests on it?
Is there any way you guys might get another sample and run it through the same (or harder) tests?
Thanks for the review, you guys are awesome.
capeconsultant - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
I second this request :)