Samsung 840 Pro SSD Review
Conclusion
Published: 21st December 2012 | Source: Samsung | Price: £185 |
Conclusion
The SSD market is extremely close, with the similarity of controllers and NAND Flash chips on all the drives meaning that, within certain obvious limitations, the sticker on the cover is the majority of the difference. Thanks to the ever reliable Moore's Law, SSDs have also dramatically reduced in price since the larger capacity drives started appearing. Samsung took advantage of the fact they produced the chips that were on most SSDs to bring the 830 to the market at a decent price and with good performance. It wasn't quite as blazing fast as the very premium models, and when handling small block sizes it struggled a little, but it was a great all rounder.
Now Samsung have gone back and tuned up all the areas that needed a little work and brought us the 840, here in Pro guise.
Unquestionably the tweaks have worked. Thanks to the more powerful ARM R4 MCX controller and better bandwidth the 840 Pro not only tops the charts in nearly all of our 'out and out speed' benchmarks, but the 4K results are a vast improvement upon the 830 and most other drives as well.
It's not only in the speed department that the 840 Pro makes us happy. Samsung have tweaked the wear-levelling algorithms to ensure that with an average amount of normal use (around 40GB a day) the drive should happily last you over 30 years. Considering that most of us replace our storage every 5 years or so, and maybe 10 years for rarely updated systems, then you can be sure that the 840 Pro will outlast its own technical obsolescence.
We have to comment upon the poor write performance we saw in Anvil. Although we don't like to handwave certain results, it's worth noting that this is the first time we've benchmarked with the RC5 version, and that all the other benchmark tests we ran showed the performance of the Samsung 840 Pro to be very good indeed in every scenario. So whilst it may be a fair reflection of the drives performance in certain extreme scenarios, our hands-on experience of the drive backs up our other benchmarks, and we feel we can confidently state that this was an aberration.
So it's blisteringly fast, will last you far longer than you need to, looks the business and, at well under the £1 per GB mark, it is great value for money too. If you're in the market for a new SSD, or looking to upgrade an earlier model that appears wheezy in comparison, we can heartily recommend the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and it wins our OC3D Gold Award.
Thanks to Samsung for providing the 840 Pro for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.
Most Recent Comments
I also found the same results with anvil and wandered what was going on
Brill review as always Bryan
I was thinking about buying the 830, but the sellers are apparently running out of stock. While 840 Pro seems to be a great drive, is it really worth the extra £60 compared to the non-pro 840 or the £30 over the 830? I'm taking about the 256/250GB versions.
Still waiting for my first SSD
hopefully in 2013 now.
Good review as always
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Originally Posted by Ulchar
Sorta wish I didn't get a 830 256GB now so i could get this...
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lurving them 
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