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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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.