Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD Review

[flibberdipper]

 

 

INTRO

I’ve had my Samsung 840 EVO 120GB since February, and now that I’ve used it for a while and gotten to know it better, I figured it was about time to do a nice review of it for everybody who wants a good SSD and a moderately low price point. I did throw Windows on it at one point to see how the software end of things was, and I’ll talk about that as well later on.

 

PERFORMANCE

Now, I can imagine that there is a TON more potential in these SSDs than what I got to see. I have a really bad case of bottlenecking going on, so my performance was gimped EXTREMELY badly. With that said, I am able to attain about 140MB/s sustained reads and 100MB/s sustained writes on my netbook (where my SSD resides). Random reads are about 60-70MB/s, and random writes are 50-60MB/s. My access times are great, often just a hair over 2ms. I upgraded from a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 160GB drive, and everything is a lot more responsive and everything loads a lot quicker.

 

SOFTWARE

The software the EVO drives ship with is pretty nice. I didn’t use Magician, since I did a fresh install of Windows 7/8, but overall it was nice. It requires you to have at least a 1024x768 display, but in this day and age if you don’t have something with a higher resolution that than… You should get a monitor instead. The software gives you things that can speed up your SSD, diagnose it, and it even lets you see how much you have written to it over its lifetime (mine is about half a terabyte right now). That was a really neat feature. It also lets you enable RAPID mode, which does have heftier system requirements that what my netbook has, so I was unable to test that feature out.

 

NOISE

Being an SSD, it’s silent. Most of the time I can only hear my netbook’s fan (which is kinda loud, but it performs well). Now, there is a bit of a coil whine sound, but I am not sure if it is the netbook itself or the SSD. I am assuming it is something in the netbook, though, since there is no correlation between it and if I am accessing my SSD.

 

CONSTRUCTION

For being a more budget-friendly SSD, it does have really nice construction. As I remember, the bottom plate is aluminum, and the top part with the Samsung branding on it is plastic. They are quite sturdy, and do not bend really at all. If this was going to be deployed in a fairly rough environment with a lot of drops and shocks, I would have to say that this SSD would last, although not as well as something more premium like an Intel 730 series SSD.

 

PCB SIZE

The 120GB and 240GB SSDs do have a smaller PCB, only accommodating up to 2 NAND chips, I believe. The higher capacity ones have a PCB that is twice as long and can have up to 8 NAND chips. However, neither of the PCBs fully fills the casing of the SSD.

 

CONCLUSION

Overall, I am extremely impressed with my EVO, and I can highly recommend one to anyone building a computer, with a somewhat small amount of money allocated towards getting an SSD. They are fast, reliable, and good looking, among other things. Not only that, the software is really nice, and from what I’ve heard the Samsung Magician software is a dream to work with, and it works really nicely when you have to clone another drive to the SSD.

 

IS IT WORTH IT?

Definetly. For the price you really can’t go wrong with one of these. They look great, they’re cheap, perform quite admirably, last a long time, and the list goes on. Until Samsung replaces the 840 line, these will remain to be my favorite SSD, even over the more reliable Intel 730 series SSDs, mainly because I find that the EVO looks better, and they seem to perform a small amount better then the enthusiast-grade Intel SSDs.

[Askew]

Keep the reviews coming man, I like 'em.

[PhantomChevron]

Awesome reviews, great work! 

[flibberdipper]

Keep the reviews coming man, I like 'em.

 

Awesome reviews, great work! 

Thanks guys. As long as I still have things to review (and if people want me to do a specific thing that I actually have) I will keep rolling them out. Next one will be a budget inkjet printer.

[Askew]

Thanks guys. As long as I still have things to review (and if people want me to do a specific thing that I actually have) I will keep rolling them out. Next one will be a budget inkjet printer.

 

If you find one that will print black without having all the colour cartridges in order I might even buy it.

 

That is the no1 BS of inkjets and I hate it.

[flibberdipper]

If you find one that will print black without having all the colour cartridges in order I might even buy it.

 

That is the no1 BS of inkjets and I hate it.

Not sure if this one can do that. It has the black and then a multi-color cartridge. Guess I'll have to find out.

[Askew]

Not sure if this one can do that. It has the black and then a multi-color cartridge. Guess I'll have to find out.

 

Yeah man, my shit is out of action right now, all I print is black documents and the motherfucker won't do sqat until I pointlessly replace the blue, which somehow has run out from lack of use....

 

I've read numerous similar stories on this forum, I even made a thread about it because it pissed me off so much lol

[flibberdipper]

Yeah man, my shit is out of action right now, all I print is black documents and the motherfucker won't do sqat until I pointlessly replace the blue, which somehow has run out from lack of use....

 

I've read numerous similar stories on this forum, I even made a thread about it because it pissed me off so much lol

My grandma's old Epson wouldn't print unless you replaced all of the cartridges at the same time. Even of some of them are full and newer, if one runs out all of them had to be replaced.

[Fate]

Thanks guys. As long as I still have things to review (and if people want me to do a specific thing that I actually have) I will keep rolling them out. Next one will be a budget inkjet printer.

What are boot times like on your netbook with this SSD?

[GamerPatriot]

Great review. I also have the same SSD. Really fast and great. 

[flibberdipper]

What are boot times like on your netbook with this SSD?

(Keep in mind the stupid bottleneck) I get about 10-15 seconds, starting with when the BIOS is done and the OS begins loading, and ends at the login screen. There is about 3-7 seconds of "idle" time, where nothing is happening. Part of an issue with Xubuntu.

 

Great review. I also have the same SSD. Really fast and great. 

Thanks. I really like mine a lot.

[Fate]

(Keep in mind the stupid bottleneck) I get about 10-15 seconds, starting with when the BIOS is done and the OS begins loading, and ends at the login screen. There is about 3-7 seconds of "idle" time, where nothing is happening. Part of an issue with Xubuntu.

 

Thanks. I really like mine a lot.

My old netbook took like 10 minutes to start up lol, I love ssd's. 

[flibberdipper]

My old netbook took like 10 minutes to start up lol, I love ssd's. 

With my old hard drive, XP was taking about 6 minutes with OS loading and then me signing in. But it was slowing down a lot anyway.

[SKOONJar]

There is only one way to describe the 840 EVO and that is bad ass. I love mine!

[flibberdipper]

There is only one way to describe the 840 EVO and that is bad ass. I love mine!

Agreed.