Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 9, 2014 1:35 PM ESTPerformance vs. Transfer Size
ATTO is a useful tool for quickly benchmarking performance across various transfer sizes. You can get the complete data set in Bench. The EVO mSATA is top of the class at all transfer sizes. Even though we're dealing with highly compressible data, which is the strength of SandForce, the EVO mSATA turns out to be slightly faster than the Intel SSD 525. Keep in mind that these tests are with an empty drive so TurboWrite plays a massive role and since the test only writes 2GB, all EVO mSATAs perform similarly regardless of the capacity.
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GreenThumb - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
How would I know if a new laptop w/ Haswell processor could accept one of these drives?mdevlin - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
One important point that was not captured in the review is thermal limiting. Our experience is that when doing large transfers (200GB+) the 1TB msata 840EVO starts to slow down and will sometimes run at 100MB/s or slower whereas we have not had this problem with the 2.5" 1TB 840 EVO. Doing a better job of cooling (even just fanning the air above a drive under test) improves mSATA performance. Not a big deal if you do not do large contiguous writes. We have never had any problem with Read performance.tomb18 - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
Has anyone actually bought one of these 1TB drives?I have bought 2, from two different locations about 6 weeks apart. If you copy a large quantity of data (over 400gB) from another disk to one of these drives, they will fail during the write. They disappear completely, are not visible at all unless you do a reboot. Thje 500GB works fine.
I have verified this now on two different SATA3 controllers and on three different Windows 7 computers. Both 1TB drives fail on write.
RMA is in process with Samsung. I was told it sounds like a controller issue on the SSD.
mdevlin - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
We have 6 of the 1TB mSATA drives and have no problem with large writes (up to 800GB) except the thermal issues mentioned above. With forced air cooling the performance is sustained throughout the transfer. without cooling speeds drop to less that 100MB/sec and it will actually pause and then resume (but not fail). we have had no failures after many full disk writes.mdevlin - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
It seems that Samsung has updated the firmware on the 1TB mSATA 840EVO. Now when the mSATA drive overheats it throttles by alternately halting for a second, then running full bore for a second. This is less disconcerting than the previous version which would slow down for long periods or even stop for 10-20 seconds.