Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD Review

The Samsung EVO 1TB Solid State Drive ships in a small dark box with an artistic image of the drive itself taking up most of the area. Capacity is listed top right, and the name of the product bottom left.

Some of the specifications are listed on the rear of the package.

The bundle includes a software disc and a little installation guide.


The drives are only 7mm thick, making them ideal for not only desktop computers but for the growing range of super slim ultraportable computers.

The EVO drives are shipping in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities rather than the more traditionally accepted 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. The rounding down (from 128GB to 120GB for instance) is due to a higher proportion of NAND being used for wear leveling duties.

Sadly, we couldn't get a look inside the chassis, as a previous reviewer had attempted to remove the TORX screws with a standard Philips screwdriver, and one of the heads was stripped.

Due to research however we know that the drive uses a portion of the NAND on each chip as SLC. This TurboWrite feature is used as an extended buffer to help increase the write speeds. The speed boost is available until the SLC portion is full, and then it will back down to TLC speeds – which should be close to the performance of the original SSD 840 drives.

The Samsung EVO drive is using the MEX controller. This is a triple core ARM design, similar to the MDX controller in the SSD 840 Pro, with a higher 400mhz clock speed.

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