The Samsung SSD 840 Evo is new, fast, affordable and very good looking. It is an elegant package that combines speed and solid performance. During Black Friday of 2013, the 250GB drive was marked down to $140 from $180 which made it an unbelievable deal at only $0.56 per GB. The purpose of this review is to give the average consumer an idea of how the drive would perform in a normal laptop and not a standard benchmarking desktop that most reviewers would use. The test laptop is a DV6-6190us (2011 Model) with a Core i7-2630QM and 8.00 GB ram running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. According to the included software, the drive is connected via a SATA 3 connection which is 6GB/s and should be able to reach maximum performance.
Aesthetics:
The drive is fully covered in metal and when left alone is cool to the touch. It feels very light, almost hollow and according to a review by AnandTech, the drive has alot of empty space inside. The way it looks is fierce yet sleek and is my favorite looking SSD thus far. Its simplistic design gives a modern feel to a part of the computer that may never be seen and this attention to detail by Samsung is much appreciated from my end.
Performance: Does it live up to the rated speeds?
According to Samsung, the drive should reach up to 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write speeds. The included Samsung Magician Software has a benchmarking tool and it seems to yield positive results.
This is only half of the story, as the benchmark seems to use algorithms that work in the favor of this drive. A more standard way of benchmarking using CrystalDiskMark is shown below.
The read speeds averaged to be 484.8 MB/s and the write speeds averaged to be 470.6 MB/s. While these are very solid, they are well below the rated speeds by around 50 MB/s.
Boot Speed:
Boot speed has dramatically decreased and can boot to a usable environment in 27 seconds as seen in the video below.
In Conclusion:
The drive at its retail price of $180 is a great deal offering stable performance and reliability yet it can be found for an incredible $140 on sale occasionally. This drive is one of the first at this price point offering stable performance with real read and write speeds over 470 MB/s making it worth every penny. If you are in need of an SSD and don’t want to spend a lot yet desire fantastic performance, the Samsung 840 Evo line is worth every penny.
Pros:
– Elegant Design
– Fast
– Reliable
– Cheap
Cons:
– Slightly Slower Than Rated
The Lost Digit 