Conclusion

Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in time obsolete.

With the 840 Evo Samsung comes with a bombshell. The combination of aggressive pricing and convincing performance sounds quite dangerous for Samsung's competitors these days, since prices of SSD's have already been dropping significantly in the past year. Apparently Samsung seems to have geared up to launch the first real attack on the SSD market and bottom line: The 840 Evo is a well performing drive, that features a highly competitive price tag. But actually, the 840 Evo is more than just another drive with an improved firmware. Samsung has also been working on their Magician software. Meanwhile Magician is very well structured and unexperienced users as well as enthusiasts will like it. Form the perspective of a novice the most important information is being display on the first splash screen and enthusiasts can dig deeper. It's even possible to control TRIM and overprovisioning yourself.  

At the beginning of the this review we were talking about the fact that the predecessor of the 840 Evo suffered low sequential write performance. This was basically the achilles heel of the Samsung 840. When we look at the performance of the 840 Evo these issues are completely gone, thanks to Samsung's neat little trick with TurboWrite. Our test drive was able to perform with 533 MB/s sequential write and 553 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured 96'300 IOPS regarding random read and 85'700 regarding random write. All these four values are excellent, and when it comes to performance the 840 Evo actually doesn't play in the league of mainstream drives. This drive is able to make even the life of a high-end drive tough. Nevertheless, this is a mainstream drive, since Samsung is using TLC (3 Bit MLC) NAND Flash, which featres a significantly lower program erase cycle count than 2 Bit MLC. In case of read intense environment, such as desktop users, this will cause no issues at all and Samsung is expecting very low RMA rates on this drive. But still you shouldn't think about using this drive in a server where several hunderd Terabytes are going to be written per day. In this case 3 Bit MLC is simply the wrong choice. 

Taking a closer look at the price we see, that the 1 Terabyte drive we had for testing costs 511 Euro, when checking Geizhals.at. In other words this means that the price per Gigabyte is meanwhile at 0.511 Euro. Not long ago SSD's were breaking through the 1 Euro per Gigabyte and nowadays Samsung as starting to half this value. These days we have a hard time finding another drive that is able to compete with the 840 Evo at this price point.

Recommendation

Should you be looking for an SSD with an excellent price/performance as well as price per gigabyte ratio, then there is no way around the Samsung 840 Evo.

 

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch