Samsung 840 EVO SSD Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,450 words · ~7 min read
0:05
Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to
0:09
win at a price you'll like click now to learn
0:14
more welcome to my long overdue unboxing
0:17
of one of the most important ssds on the market this is the 840 Evo it is not the
0:23
fastest SSD it's not the cheapest SSD
0:26
but what it is is the complete package it's available in pretty much any Capac
0:29
City 12250 5750 and 1 tbte they are all reasonably
0:35
aggressively priced and because of some unique features that Samsung's
0:38
implemented extremely competitive performance-wise in spite of the very
0:43
middling hardware specs so that's a bold claim lineus why would you say that and
0:47
the answer will come later on in the video after you sit and listen to me
0:50
talk about other stuff so first up hardware specs they have Shrunk the
0:54
manufacturing process down to we think 19 nanometer but they're calling it 1X
0:58
class nanometers which means that prices have come down versus the last
1:02
generation product they are still using TLC Nan flash so that is 3 bit Percell
1:06
mlc flash making the data densities
1:09
higher than what other guys who are using 2 bit percel mlc even in their
1:13
entry-level drives are using but because Samsung has made some changes to their
1:18
already excellent MDX controller so it's now the Mex Three core controller they
1:23
are able to achieve great performance in spite of the inherently much slower
1:28
right speeds that TLC flash has to work with so it's also got SATA 3.1 over SATA
1:34
3 on the last generation product and they've added Hardware AES 256
1:37
encryption so that's basically there see there's a code on the back of this drive
1:41
so that's basically a way to make it so someone's completely locked out of your
1:45
drive unless they're willing to completely erase it so you can secure your data even from theft in the event
1:51
that someone actually gets your drive and they can't even put it in anywhere else and unlock it so endurance is of
1:57
course the big thing people talk about with TLC flash because not only does it
2:01
write slower it also doesn't write as many times every SSD will die it
2:06
actually has a rated number of rights that will eventually kill it now most
2:10
ssds will actually last much longer than that rated right speed and you can see
2:14
they've done some extreme testing over on Extreme systems go figure they do extreme testing there I just don't think
2:19
it's that important even if it didn't last any longer than the rated number of
2:23
right Cycles you look at an excellent comparison by a NCH so that'll be linked
2:27
in the video description huge a NCH fanboy over here if you guys didn't already know that they estimate that
2:33
even with a very aggressive workload these drives which are the consumer
2:37
grade drives are going to be lasting for
2:40
years depending on the capacity now the larger the capacity of the drive the
2:44
longer it's going to last to the point where you're looking at drives that are probably going to last for decades or
2:48
die from some other reason rather than die from being written to too many times
2:52
and it should also be noted that ssds are much less likely to be damaged by
2:57
shock or any other kind of phys physical
3:00
you know demise that hard drives can meet because they don't have any moving
3:05
parts now let's get into that bold claim that I made about why this drive which
3:09
has TLC flash you know a faster clocked Three core controller 400 MHz versus 300
3:15
MHz and you know otherwise isn't that
3:18
special is the drive to beat and three things turbo Rite rapid and their new
3:23
data migration to software so what turbo Rite is is a way of taking part of the
3:27
storage on the drive and it varies according to the Capac capity of your particular drive it goes up as you have
3:31
more capacity and takes part of that TLC Flash and runs it in SLC mode so if
3:37
you're not familiar with SLC that means only one bit per cell all right so
3:42
that's even potentially faster than mlc back when that was the performance and
3:46
long endurance one in mlc was the redheaded stepchild whereas now it's
3:49
high performance mlc and then TLC as the one that is you know perceived as less
3:54
reliable and slower so what that means is that when the drive gets written to
3:59
it fills up that that SLC behaving cash
4:03
first then distributes that data to the rest of the drive at its Leisure that
4:07
means that in real world terms the drive is faster unless you're doing a very
4:12
long sustained right to it now reads are still fine on TLC flash so turbo Rite
4:17
has pretty much no drawback in a day-to-day usage scenario which is very
4:22
very cool you can enable it using Samsung's SSD magician software it's
4:26
very fast very low latency but it does rely a again on non-continuous use so
4:32
again I'm in a non-tech fanboy guys and you can check out their excellent
4:35
article on turbo right which is linked in the video description as well next up
4:39
is rapid which stands for fast no actually it stands for Real Time
4:44
accelerated processing of IO Data and
4:47
what rapid does is it allows you to take a gig of your Dam so that is your system
4:52
memory and use that to cach the SSD now this one I'm not quite sure if I feel as
4:57
you know uh completely POS POS about as I do about turbo Rite because it caches
5:02
not only reads but also wrs which means that if your system does lose power in
5:06
the middle of it caching something into memory this is not the same as caching
5:10
to SLC flash which is still going to be there when the system reboots and the
5:14
power goes down memory is cleared when the power goes out so it can cause data
5:19
corruption but if you're running on a laptop or anything else that has a
5:22
battery backup such as a desktop with a UPS and your system's very stable I
5:26
wouldn't worry about it too too much so what it does is it takes up to a gig of
5:31
your system memory and allows it to operate many times faster than even the
5:35
fastest SSD can because it is effectively reading and writing out of
5:39
RAM it's not the same as a RAM dis implementation because it's all
5:43
completely uh it's all completely automated unlike RAM disk software which
5:48
often requires a lot of manual intervention the next one up is data
5:51
migration 2 so what that allows you to do is say okay well I bought this new
5:55
SSD but I could only afford a 250 gig SSD and quite frankly the hard drive
5:59
that I bought like four years ago is already 500 gigs and I've got all this
6:03
data on it what am I supposed to do if I migrate it over what am I are all my
6:07
videos and photos and songs just lost in The Ether the answer is no what data
6:11
migration 2 does is it allows you to specify two Targets so you can clone
6:15
your OS and all the important programs and stuff over to an SSD and then you
6:19
can have a secondary hard drive that all your data goes to so it's actually
6:22
painless enough to use that even my mother can do it so we're going to do a
6:25
follow-up video on rapid the data migration 2 software as well as turbo
6:30
that's going to be hosted by slick but basically without even watching that all
6:35
you need to know is this drive just
6:38
pretty much rocks thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the
6:42
Samsung 840 Evo don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if
6:46
you disliked it leave a comment if you have something to say to me how much did
6:49
Samsung pay you to make this video Believe It or Not sometimes I just like
6:52
stuff and I'm allowed to do that and as always guys don't forget to
6:58
subscribe
7:06
he