Review: Ssd Samsung 840 Pro (256Gb)

[TCH-Blog]

Hey all, this is a write up on what, in my opinion, seems to possibly be one of the fastest drives to ever hit the consumer market. Disclaimer: The following review is my personal opinion and does not reflect TCH in any way.

(Photo Credit: Samsung.com)
At A Glance,

The Samsung 840 Pro seems to be one of the fastest SSD’s on the consumer market, but this comes with a pretty hefty price tag. The Samsung 840 Pro in the 256 GB denomination  seems to come in at around $250 ($139 for the 128 GB, and around $500 for the 512GB). This price tag may seem a bit hefty considering you may be able to pull slightly slower speeds out of cheaper drives. However, something different about this SSD compared to others is that it is the first and only SSD on the market with a 5-Year Warranty. Considering that a lot of SSD’s will die after a 4-year period this is astounding that Samsung will back their product for 5-years.

The Packaging,

The packaging was astounding, surprisingly it came in a yellow-bubble wrap padded envelope which is more eco-friendly. Inside the yellow-envelope came a thin small black box branded Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and inside the box came two instruction manuals, a set of stickers to put on your laptop if you please, the Samsung SSD Magician Software (Windows compatible only), and a black plastic frame holding the SSD.

 

After A …,

After a week, The first drive that was sent to me completely failed, it was dead on arrival. After contacting  Newegg for the RMA they responded the same day, payed for my shipping label, and I sent it in soon after, the same day they received it they contacted me and told me that they would be replacing it and sent out a new SSD in the next day or so and it got here a week later. Even though I wish the first SSD would have been functional Newegg handled it wonderfully. The new drive works great and is extremely fast in my MacBook Pro, there seems to be no problems so far, however a few applications have been a bit glitchy after being cloned, such as the video chat client ooVoo.

After A few months, The drive works great and is insanely fast! I have not had one single problem since!
 

Performance,

For 6gb/s SATA or SATA III, the promised performance is as below, however most reviewers have benchmarked the drive’s speeds above this. I, for one, can’t confirm or deny this because I currently am using a computer with SATA II which brings me speeds of around 206MB/s Write, and 268MB/s Read.

Capacity	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB
Model	MZ-7PD128	MZ-7PD256	MZ-7PD512
Type of Drive	Solid State Drive (SSD)
Form Factor	2.5-inch (Reduced 7mm thickness for use with ultraportables and netbooks)
For Use With	Desktop and laptop PCs (including ultraportables and netbooks) and workstations
Interface	SATA 6Gbits/s (backwards compatible with SATA 3Gbits/s and SATA 1.5Gbits/s)
Random Read Speeds	97K IOPS	100K IOPS
Sequential Read/Write Speeds	530 MB/s / 390 MB/s	540 MB/s / 520 MB/s
Controller	3-Core Samsung MDX Controller
Type of NAND Flash	2xnm Samsung Toggle DDR 2.0 NAND Flash Memory (400Mbps)
Type of Cache	256MB Samsung LPDDR2 SDRAM	512MB Samsung LPDDR2 SDRAM
Included Software	Samsung Magician 4.x, Samsung Smart Data Migration software
Dimensions	0.28 by 2.75 by 3.94 in. (H x W x D)
Warranty	5-Year Limited

The Bottom Line,

This drive has so far been fantastic, other than the failed drive I see little to no flaws with the Samsung 840 Pro so far. Even though the price may be quite large considering the price of SSD’s currently, this drive is worth it! With its crazy fast speeds and its industry standard breaking warranty, the Samsung 840 Pro is a promising competitor to any other SSD on the consumer market!

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