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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Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
We managed to run all of our normal tests (i.e. the stuff needed for this review) and Anand was simply running some enterprise tests to see how the 840 Pro behaves there. This is quite normal testing for us, so it's not like we were trying to break the drive on purpose.A new drive is already on its way to Anand, plus I have the regular 840.
Benny_k80 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
What happened to the information about the defect drives? Did Samsung have any explanation?hasseb64 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Why the big differens between claimed and tested power consumption?Roughly 3 watts is very high in a ultrabook, are there any sub 1 watt SDD left out there?
Per Hansson - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
hasseb64: look at the previous comments regarding DIPM & EIST.There might be some problems with the testing performed, lack of DIPM can have a huge power consumption difference...
The sampling interval of the device they use to measure power consumption is also very important since SSD's switch power states very very frequently...
GullLars - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
I just have to say, this drive impressed me. If the stability is the same as 830 Samsung has a real winner here.One of the things i note here is something i've noticed the lack of in other SSDs earlier, and been vocal about. Since the SSDs have large DRAM buffers, they should easily be able to use it as a read-ahead for small block sequential and low QD sequential reads. Going by the iometer 128KB seq read and ATTO graphs, i'd say this is exactly what samsung has done.
It also seems they have implemented a decent sized write buffer to do the same for writes. Let's hope it's implemented safely so you don't loose or corrupt data on powerloss.
I've been recommending 830 lately, and if early reports (after the first month) indicate 840 pro is stable, it will be the my recommendation if the prices are decent.
With the maxing of SATA 6Gbps getting close (or is already here?), it's now time for SATA Express or just native PCIe SSDs.
thefizzle656 - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
Hey Kristian between the 840 Pro and the M5 Pro which would you choose? It would be going into a 2011 MBP for both OS X and Boot Camp. I'm looking to get a 512 GB drive and it looks like the M5 Pro is going to coming in at less than $450, so my thought is to get the drive that is the cheapest. Please let me know. Thanks.chrcoluk - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Whilst these benchmarks all look pretty sweet, they ultimately dont mean much.In real world usage I expect a 840 PRO wont feel any faster than my 830 at all, and the fact they sweep aside a quickly driving drive as not relevant is a worry.
Whilst performance is important, reliability is something I value higher. Also value for money shouldnt be ignored either, so in my opinion the best thing about this drive is it is making the 830 cheaper.
Also the non pro 840 uses TLC which I suspect reduces life expectancy and increases CRC error rates, I would avoid the normal 840 completely whilst MLC drives are still on the market.
So thanks for the review and thanks for the price drops samsung so now I can buy another 830 this time for my laptop :).
dgigibao - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Several times you recommend the Samsung 830 for Mac OSX users for the same kind of controller whitch Apple in puts in their factory SSD. Whould would recommend 840 Pro for Mac OSX users to?Benny_k80 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
What happened to the information about the defect drives? Did Samsung have any explanation?FCss - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link
I was about to buy this SSD today and just went through the article again and saw the update about the second drive dying. I hope it's not a design flaw.