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. But these first lines were about the 840 Evo in general, what about the 840 Evo 120 GB specifically? 

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 219 MB/s sequential write and 504 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured 91'600 IOPS regarding random read and 38'000 regarding random write. Unfortunately sequential write performance is still disappointing but on the other hand, there is the read performance as well as the IOPS which are all highly competitive. Other than that you should keep in mind, that 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 hundred 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 120 Gigabyte drive costs 85 Euro these days. This makes the 840 Evo not the cheapest 120 Gigabyte drive, but still it ranges in the middle.

Recommendation

Should you be looking for a solid 120 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