Samsung SSD 840 EVO Review: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB & 1TB Models Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2013 1:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Samsung
- TLC
- Samsung SSD 840
Inside the Drives & Spare Area
The EVO is offered in a single form factor - 2.5" at a 7mm thickness. There are three torx (T5) screws that hold the chassis together, removing them gets you a look at the EVO's very simple internals. Surprisingly enough there's no thermal pad between Samsung's MEX controller and the chassis.
Samsung, like Intel, does a great job of reducing the number of screws and simplifying the assembly of its drives. I would prefer if Samsung didn't insist on using torx screws to hold the chassis together but I'm sure it does have some impact on reducing returns. There's also growing concern of counterfit SSDs which I guess screw choice could somewhat address.
There are two PCB sizes used in the EVO lineup, neither of which occupies the full volume of the 2.5"/7mm chassis. The 120 and 250GB drives use the smallest PCB, while the other drives use the larger layout. The larger PCB has room for 8 NAND packages, while the half length PCB can accommodate two. Each of the NAND packages can hold up to 8 x 128Gbit 19nm TLC die.
To deal with the realities of TLC, Samsung sets aside more of the drive for use as spare area on the EVO than it does on its MLC Pro line. Due to TurboWrite however, the percentage is actually a bit less than it was on last year's 840.
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO Memory | |||||||
| Advertised Capacity | 120GB | 250GB | 500GB | 750GB | 1TB | ||
| DRAM Size | 256MB LPDDR2-1066 | 512MB LPDDR2-1066 | 512MB LPDDR2-1066 | 1GB LPDDR2-1066 | 1GB LPDDR2-1066 | ||
| # of NAND Packages | 2 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | ||
| # of NAND die per Package | 4 | 8 | 8 | 4 | 8 | ||
| NAND Capacity per Package | 64 GiB | 128 GiB | 128 GiB | 96 GiB | 128 GiB | ||
| Total NAND | 128 GiB | 256 GiB | 512 GiB | 768 GiB | 1024 GiB | ||
| Spare Area | 12.7% | 9.05% | 9.05% | 9.05% | 9.05% | ||
I've tossed internal shots of all of the EVO lineup into the gallery below:
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MVR - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
It will be very interesting when they start loading these up with more than 512MB of DRAM cache. Imagine a drive with 4-8+ GB on board. The response times would be insane. It is only a matter of time considering you can buy 8GB of SODIMM memory for $70. They could probably put it on board for $50 added cost to the drive - then these would truly act like PCIe SSD cards, except it would totally max out the SATA3 throughput limit.MVR - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Of course SATA revision 3.2 at 16gbit/sec would sure enjoy it. Imagine a pair of those in RAID 0 :)Wao - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
I'm going to change my old noisy hard disk with a Samsung 840 EVO 1TB model. I am wondering if I really need to enable TRIM in OS X. I check the data sheet. It only said "Yes" about garbage collection and TRIM support. Does it meant that this model has its own garbage collection built-in, or I really need to enable TRIM in OS X. Honestly, I don't like to hack around the system files.Thanks !
iradel - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
In the "IMFT vs. Samsung NAND Comparison" table, how did you get a Pages per Block value of 256 for 19nm TLC (a.k.a. the 840 EVO)? 8KB * 256 pages per block would imply an erase block size of 2048KB, whereas I've read that the 840 EVO has an EBS of 1536KB (which would mean 192 pages per block).Where did you get the 256 value?
sambrightman - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link
I have the same question. I've read both the 840 and 840 EVO have 1536KiB EBS due to TLC, this is the only place saying 2MiB. Did you find an answer?Scraps - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
What would be the optimum configuration for this situation. A MacBook Pro with 2 samsung evo 1tb. Would striped raid zero be the best ?code42 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
Can I use the Samsung 840 Pro 1TB with a NAS solution? Can some propose a nice setup? ThanksHal9009 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
Just received my new ASUS N550JV and updated the slow HD with 840 EVO-Series 750GB SSD, 16GB of G.SKILL 16GB (2 x 8G) 204-Pin DDR3 and a fresh copy of win-7x64...could not be happier, Samsung makes great SSDs7beauties - Saturday, December 28, 2013 - link
I bought the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB because Maximum PC gave it a 9 Kick *ss award, but they described it as being MLC. Good ole Anand tells it like it is. This is TLC. I was pretty steamed with Samsung because they describe this as their "new 3 bit MLC NAND," which I wouldn't have bought over Crucial's M500 960GB MLC SSD. Though Anand tries to calm fears of TLC's endurance, I can't understand what a "GiB" is and how I can calculate my drive's life span.verjic - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
I have a question. In some of the tests I found of real life use shows that Kingston V300 and Samsung a practically the same speed and even at copy 2 GB of 26000 files is slowly on samsung with about 30 %!!! Also installing a program like photoshop, takes longer on Samsung than Kingston, difference is not so big but is arou 10-15 %. Why is that? From all the test for kingston and Samsung, everyone say that Samsung is better but I don't see how? If anyone can explain to me, please