Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell December 6, 2013 Featured Announcement, SSD Drives

Rating: 9.0.

In the run up to Christmas there is no better time to treat yourself to a new bit of kit. How about a new Solid State Drive? How about one that can handle your operating system and all your files and games as well? Today we revisit the Samsung EVO 1TB which is available now for less than £450 inc vat.

It may be hard to believe but there was a time when a Solid State drive was £10 per GB. Prices this year have dropped to an all time low with the Crucial M500 960GB available for only £373.00 inc vat. The Samsung EVO 1TB may be more expensive but it is quicker and offers a slightly higher capacity.

The Samsung 840 EVO uses NAND manufactured on a 19nm process. This has meant that Samsung have been able to increase the capacity to 1TB, a size that a couple of years ago would have seemed impossible. Technically the process shrinks can mean that product lifespan is reduced as well. This is due to more electrons being trapped in the smaller oxide layers and these will wear out over time.

Samsung however have clearly still got confidence in the product as they give a three year warranty with these EVO drives, although it is worth bearing in mind that is reduced from the five year warranty supplied with the Pro series.

Overview:

1TB (1TB=1 Trillion byte by IDEMA) * Actual usable capacity may be less (due to formatting, partitioning, operating system, applications or otherwise).
2.5inch Form Factor.
SATA 6Gb/s Interface, compatible with SATA 3Gb/s & SATA 1.5Gb/s interface.
100 x 69.85 x 6.8mm Dimension.
Max 53g Weight.
Samsung 1x nm Toggle DDR 2.0 NAND Flash Memory (400Mbps).
Samsung 3-core MEX Controller.
Samsung 1GB Low Power DDR2 SDRAM cache memory.
Recommended for Desktop PC & Laptop PC.

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.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 2

Compare system:
CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit

Other Drives
OCZ Vector 150 240GB
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Visiontek Racer Series 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update)
Transcend SSD720 128GB
Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw)
Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

PCIe drives test system:
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 8
IOMeter

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64.

4K QD32 performance is very strong, averaging right at the top of our chart. A very strong result if you are dealing regularly with incompressible data.

The controller is able to deal with compressible data at the same level as incompressible. Very strong results all around.

Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD scores exceptionally well in this test, holding a steady set of performance results across the full range of data sizes.

Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD only deals with incompressible data and this highlights the strength of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD. The overall score of 1,119 points is actually one of the highest we have ever achieved.

Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
PCMark 8 is the latest version in our popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs.

Good all round results in the latest PCMark from Futuremark.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.

Every manufacturer rates IOPS performance in a slightly different way. Using our own testing methodology we can see that IOPS performance from the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB is right up there with the best drives, actually matching the OCZ Vector 150 240GB which we reviewed in November.
There is no doubt that the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB is a very high performance Solid State Drive able to battle with the fastest products on the market today, however the hottest topic of debate is going to be around the question ‘is a 1TB Solid State Drive really affordable?'.

Not so long ago, many enthusiast users were dreaming of a time when they would be able to get their hands on a 1TB Solid State Drive. A large portion of our readers may say ‘sure, great drive, but it will still cost me £445!‘.

It is a fair point, but I remember reviewing the biggest capacity (at the time) Kingston SSDNowV+ Series 512GB back in September 2010 and it cost £1,099 inc vat. It doesn't require much work to realise that in the space of 3 years, we are now able to get twice the capacity for less than half the price. This isn't even factoring in the fact that the Kingston drive was only rated at 220 MB/s sequential read, and 180 MB/s sequential write. The Samsung 840 EVO 1TB was capable of delivering 550 MB/s and 530 MB/s in the ATTO sequential read and write tests today, respectively.

It makes sense to understand that this 1TB drive is clearly marketed at the enthusiast user who spends a lot of money on components. If you are only budgeting £500 on a new system, then spending almost the same amount on a solid state drive alone doesn't make much sense. The 120GB version of this 840 EVO drive however is only £72 inc vat so for many people it is a solid option. If you are building a high end system, then adding in one of these 1TB drives means no concerns about running out of space for the operating system and any application installs, now or anytime in the future.

We also tested this drive for compatibility inside the Sony Playstation 4, and while it was limited to the SATA 2 internal speeds of the new console it did make a noticeable difference especially with the excellent Assassins Creed BlackFlag. Load times were reduced by around 30-35%, although spending more money on the Solid State Drive than the console itself may be difficult to justify.

If you want one of these drives, then Amazon have stock and the prices have been reduced from £510 to £445.99 inc vat recently. Other options? The Crucial M500 960GB is £378.00 inc vat, but bear in mind it is slower and has a 40GB lower total capacity.

Pros: