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.

The 840 Evo mSATA and the 840 Evo with in 2.5 inch form factor are basically the same drives. In this case we can expect the same level of performance as well as a similar bundle. Therefore it's no surprise that also the mSATA version of the 840 Evo is compatible with the latest version of Magician software suite. As we already wrote in our reviews on the 2.5 inch 840 Evo the latest version of Magican is very well done. It is easy to understand and use but still offers lot and lots of options for enthusiast grade users.

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. Our test drive was able to perform with 324 MB/s sequential write and 532 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured 99'500 IOPS regarding random read and 76'700 regarding random write. Unfortunately sequential write performance could still be quite a bit higher. But when looking at random read as well as random write, then everything is perfectly well. Especially the fact, that this drives hits almost 100'000 IOPS when it comes to random reads, makes it really attractive from a performance persepective.

Other than jsut raw performance you should keep in mind, this drive 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 environments, such as desktop computing and home 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 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 this 250 Gigabyte drive costs 146 Euro these days. This makes the 840 Evo mSATA one of the cheapest mSATA drives available.

Recommendation

Should you be looking for a solid 250 Gigabyte SSD, then the Samsung 840 Evo is a good choice.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Random write KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 10 - Conclusion

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch