Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 9, 2014 1:35 PM ESTFinal Words
I would say the biggest market for mSATA drives right now is DIY upgrades to Ultrabooks and other laptops with existing mSATA SSDs (or in some cases there's an empty mSATA slot). One of the most common complaints I hear about Ultrabooks is their limited storage capacity because many got used to the thinking that even $400 laptops have 500GB of storage. Nowadays most SSD-only systems ship with a 128GB SSD, which to be honest is a significant downgrade if you've gotten used to having at least half a terabyte in your laptop. The rise of cloud services has reduced the need for internal storage (most smartphones and tablets only have 8-32GB) but there are still plenty of scenarios where cloud is out of question. Take photographers as an example -- if you shoot large RAW photos, uploading/downloading them constantly doesn't sound like the best idea especially if you happen to live in a region where unlimited Internet is only a dream.
In the past if you wanted a bigger mSATA SSD, your options maxed out at 256GB (Mushkin's Atlas was the only exception, though you had to sacrifice performance for capacity). For hybrid systems (i.e. PCs with a small SSD for caching and a hard drive for storage) 256GB can cut it since the storage needs are fulfilled by the hard drive but if you have an SSD-only system 256GB may not be much of an upgrade over the 128GB that most systems ship with.
Four EVO mSATA take roughly the same space as one 2.5" drive
That is where the EVO mSATA excels in. With capacity of up to 1TB and an impressive performance result, it is truly a no-compromise mSATA SSD. mSATA is no longer a tradeoff between capacity and size, the EVO mSATA provides everything that the 2.5" EVO does but at ~1/4 the footprint. Add that to the fact that the EVO mSATA is built on the same platform as the 2.5" EVO, which has been one of our highest recommendations since its release. What Anand said in his 840 EVO review's final words suits here perfectly as well: "To say that I really like the EVO is an understatement".
Samsung continually amazes me in the SSD space. The EVO mSATA is yet another proof that their engineering is state-of-the-art and almost one step ahead of others. I cannot wait to see what else Samsung has in their sleeves for 2014, and we will analyze with a critical eye as always, but the start is great for sure.
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Chubblez - Thursday, January 9, 2014 - link
I have 8 5 shelf SAN's (EMC AX4-5f) all full of 1 and 2TB drives that would disagree with you.I also have 4 256G EVO's that get hammered pretty hard in an HP server, but I can't speak to the very long term effects. Initial data tells me your wrong on that as well.
Death666Angel - Sunday, January 12, 2014 - link
I have 8 2TB drives since October 2011 running in 2 RAID 5 in my file server (consumer grade Samsung, WD, Hitachi). I have 2 1TB 2.5" drives running since 2 years in my desktop. I have a 1TB and a 1.5TB 3.5" drive for well over 4 years in external enclosures. Not one failed. So let's pit anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence, shall we?dgingeri - Thursday, January 9, 2014 - link
I'd like to see Samsung put out a 500Gb or 1TB SSD with a m.2 PCIe connection. That with an adapter for two m.2 PCIe drives on a PCIe x4 card would make my year. I'd finally be able to get all the drives out of my system and bring it down to just motherboard, cards, H100, and power supply.romrunning - Thursday, January 9, 2014 - link
Why does the Samsung 840 Pro score really badly in the "Destroyer" tests, but are at the top of pretty much every other benchmark shown here?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, January 9, 2014 - link
Because it only has 7% OP by default, whereas most drives have 12% nowadays. In steady-state even small differences in OP can play a major role.blanarahul - Thursday, January 9, 2014 - link
Do you think it would be beneficial to 'not' have Turbowrite at or above 500 GB and focus more on parallism?? I ask this because a 250 GB 840 Evo achieves about 260 MB/s after it runs out of TW cache. So I would expect the 500 GB or above Evo to atleast reach 500 MB/s.Solid State Brain - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
Question: do Samsung 840 EVO SSDs have less OP than the previous 840 ones, since a percentage of the reserved space is now used for the fixed SLC cache area/TurboWrite?With trim enabled, that should not be a problem (as it makes the drive have "dynamic OP" with free space), but under intense workloads it might, if it's the case.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
Technically yes. The 840 actually has slightly better IO consistency, which the higher OP explains.https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/128928769/IO%2...
(The title reads Intel DC S3700 but that's because I use it's graph as a basis of other graphs to guarantee that they're all the same size)
romrunning - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
That's interesting. I guess that means if you manually over-provision the 840 Pro, then it should dominate the Destroyer benchmark as well. It would be nice to test that scenario out.Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 10, 2014 - link
Due to the nature of the Destroyer, it's unfortunately not possible to assign the test for a certain LBA range (i.e. add OP).