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
Final Words
I was extremely excited about Crucial's M500 because it was the first reasonably priced ~1TB SSD. Even though its performance wasn't class leading, it was honestly good enough to make the recommendation a no-brainer. The inclusion of features like eDrive support were just the icing on the cake. With the EVO, Samsung puts forth a formidable competitor to the M500. It's faster, uses less power at idle and carries lower MSRPs for most of the capacity range. Microsoft's eDrive standard isn't supported at launch, but Samsung expects to change that via a firmware update this September.
Endurance isn't a concern with TLC for client workloads, although I wouldn't recommend deploying the EVO in a write heavy database server or anything like that.
The additional features that Samsung threw in the pot this round really show some innovative thinking. TurboWrite does a good job of blurring the lines between MLC and TLC performance, while Samsung's RAPID DRAM cache offers adventurous users a way of getting a taste of high-end PCIe SSD performance out of an affordable TLC SATA drive.
The 1TB version is exciting because it offers a competitive price with the 960GB M500 but with better performance. It's also good to have an alternative there as the 960GB M500 has been supply constrained at times. At first I didn't believe that Samsung's TLC strategy could hold weight against the Intel/Micron approach of aggressively pursuing smaller process nodes with MLC NAND, but the EVO does a lot to change my opinion. I'd have no issues with one of these drives in my system even as primary storage. The performance story is really good (particularly with the larger capacities), performance consistency out of the box is ok (and gets better if you can leave more free space on the drive) and you've got Samsung's firmware expertise supporting you along the way as well.
To say that I really like the EVO is an understatement. If Samsung can keep quantities of the 840 EVO flowing, and keep prices at or below its MSRP, it'll be a real winner and probably my pick for best mainstream SSD.
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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