Samsung 840 EVO SSD review - Article

The Samsung 840 EVO series with TurboWrite buffer gets tested

In an all new article on a Samsung product we test, benchmark and review the Samsung 840 EVO SSD. The regular 840 and 840 Pro already were fantastic pieces of technology. However with the EVO Samsung tries to raise the bar even further as the SSD 840 EVO was designed to deliver a notch more speed and even better reliability. Now, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning. And I've stated it a couple of times already, it really is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing in a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 550 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today ... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir .. I am a fan, an SSD addict if you will.

For today's review we'll put the successor of the Samsung 840 series under the microscope. Samsung last week paper-launched the EVO series SSDs. There are a few major differences with this new SSD, first and foremost Samsung wanted the write performance to be more consistent and faster. Combine that with an affordable price and volume storage sizes of up-to 1 TB (!) we can assume that Samsung is hitting the SSD market hard and fierce.

A new technology is being introduced as well. It is called TurboWrite, where Samsungs changes a TLC NAND bufffer into an SLC programmable partition to speed up write performance, which we'll discuss in depth on the next pages. Samsung’s new 840 EVO product line is powered by the company’s newly revised controller called Samsung MEX controller. The controller in this drive will be amongst the fastest we have ever tested and is paired with Samsung's latest 1xnm NAND class flash memory. Samsung uses 1x nm Samsung Toggle DDR 2.0 NAND Flash Memory (400Mbps). They didn't disclose the exact nm fabrication node, but we expect this to be 19nm. IOPS numbers differ per model, but are sitting in the 94,000 ~ 98,000 mark in read performance. Overall for the 840 EVO series performance has increased as well. Sequential reads should show roughly 540 MB/s whilst Write performance now can peak to 520MB for the larger volume and 410 MB/sec for the smallest 120GB model. But have a peek and then browse to the next page please.

Samsung 840 EVO SSD with 1x nm NAND and the Samsung MEX controller