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
PCMark 7
PCMark 7's secondary storage benchmark does little to show us differences between modern, high-performance SSDs as everything here scores within 5% of one another - but that's the point. For most mainstream client uses you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between two good 6Gbps SSDs. Worry more about cost and reliability than outright performance if you're considering an SSD for a normal machine. Anything you see here will be much faster than a mechanical drive.
Performance Over Time & TRIM
Over time SSDs can get into a fairly fragmented state, with pages distributed randomly all over the LBA range. TRIM and the naturally sequential nature of much client IO can help clean this up by forcing blocks to be recycled and as a result become less fragmented. Leaving as much free space as possible on your drive helps keep performance high (20% is a good number to shoot for), but it's always good to see how bad things can get before the GC/TRIM routines have a chance to operate. As always I filled all user addressible LBAs with data, wrote enough random data to the drive to fill the spare area and then some, then ran a single HD Tach pass to visualize how slow things got:
The 840 Pro is really no different than the 830 when it comes to how low performance can get in the worst case scenario. Client users will want to keep some free space on the drive to avoid getting backed into this type of a performance corner. TRIM will obviously help and looks to be fully functional on the 840 Pro:
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Benny_k80 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Me too. I'm about to order one but i wont do it until i get any clarification :(Beaver M. - Sunday, November 18, 2012 - link
I guess thats why they are still not available/have been not available for so long.Still, Samsung should have told Anandtech already whats going on...
KenCl - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
I'm seeing them in stock all the time now. I was just about to order one when I saw that updated comment about both samples dying. I was patting myself on the back for not jumping in on the bleeding edge and had decided that now the technology is mature enough and reliable plus the comfort of the 5 yr warranty so time to dive in....Of course, 2 samples dying, while a bit off putting, is far from statistically significant.
Well, there are a lot of good deals on Intel SSD's right now....
gerlin - Thursday, January 24, 2013 - link
Has anyone successfully enabled encryption?When I enable the HD Password setting in my BIOS, as soon as I reboot the laptop and enter the password when prompted I get a disk error message. I have tried this on two different ThinkPad laptops and with two different SSD 840 Pro Drives.
Luckily, I can go back into BIOS, enter the password I created and remove the password and the drives show up fine. I read that some OCZ SSD drives had issues with BIOS passwords and that was fixed with a SSD firmware update. I don't know if this has a similar issue with my ThinkPads.
I talked to Samsung support, though they basically said it should work and they have not heard of any issues. I don't think many users actual enable the BIOS HD Password (and therefor enable the encryption protection).
I don't think there is really anything I could be doing wrong *though I would be happy is someone could tell me I am), since it is a simple matter of just enabling the password in BIOS. I know I am using the assigned password and that the drive accepts it, since it lets me past the prompt when I put the correct password. The problem is that at that point the drive looks invalid to BIOS. It doesn't just skip the drive, I get a "Error 0200 Failure Fixed Disk 0" error and my only option is to enter BIOS.
I have an old conventional drive with hardware FDE that works fine on the same laptop.
So, again, I am just wondering is this is working for anyone else?
Breta - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Beware of these drives. They are not reliable. I have 2 piece of this. They can't be used in the RAID Array. They freeze in the range 2-48 hours and become unavailable to next computer power off/on cycle. Samsung refuses any support to correct this bug. Samsung support said."Samsugn does not provide RAID support regarding the units. The units can be placed in the array however it is at the users discretion."
TorwaK - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - link
Thanks for the heads up. I was planning to buy 2 units of 840 Pro and use them in RAID 0 mode. :(