Tom's mod's Samsung 840pro review

[4745454b]

Greetings readers of Toms Hardware. A few of us mods have recently received a new Samsung 840pro to test, provided that we detail what we did with them and show how fast they are. This is the thread detailing that for us three.

My test system comprises of a 3570K, Gigabyte Z77x-UD4H, CM 212+, 16GBs of DDR3-1600, Gigabyte 7950 WF3 with three 25” LCD monitors and a 40” TV hooked up over HDMI, all powered by an Antec 750W Green. I have many drives, but the ones that matter are the Samsung 840pro, an older Samsung SSD in the 470, and a random drive, a Seagate 7200.10 750GB. Those will be the drives I bench against. (OS drive is a smaller 7200.10 250GB.) The read/write speeds for these drives will be listed in the test section below.

Other then showing the difference in synthetic read/write speeds, I hope to show how a faster drive can save you time. I will be zipping up a collection of files into a zip folder. It is 6388 files that are mostly “small” .jpeg with a few 700MB .avi's in there as well. Total file size is 6509MBs. I will also test game and level load times. I also have an idea about trying to get a drive to choke by doing many things to it at once. Scan drive for virus, while playing music, while playing movie, while playing game. I want to see if read/write speed will allow me to do more things at once off one drive.

Got the bulk of my review up now. Either talk to us as a group here, or if you have a question about something we did then use our individual threads.

4745454b - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1712802/4745454b-user-review-samsung-840pro.html#11029790

 

[Tseg]

I look forward to your analysis. I just put a 256GB 840pro in my system 2 days ago that previously had a Seagate 1.5T HDD (now my data archive disk), I7-3.4Ghz, 8GB RAM. My system went from snappy to very snappy. My boot time went from 20 sec. to 10 sec., and then I save fractions of seconds throughout the day. As awesome as it is, in practical terms it may save me 2-3 minutes per day per day vs. what I had. Is getting back 15 hours of your life every year worth $250?

I understand 256GB+ is faster than <=120GB SSD. Which is yours?

 

[4745454b]

We got the 256GB model. I won't be listing boot times as I don't shut down my PC. As mentioned my OS still sits on the 7200.10 250GB drive, so no speed up there either. My poor PC is probably going to wonder what is going on because in the next few days it's going to see more reboots then its probably ever seen.

For me those few minutes won't mean much. But for a business that deals in large files like I mentioned with the zip file, a few minutes a day (can) mean more productivity from workers. Which is good. Sneak peek, just moving from the 7200.10 750 to the Samsung 470, the time to create the zip dropped by 100seconds. I can't wait to see what doubling the R/W speeds again will do.

 

[rubix_1011]

My plan is to test a handful of applications that I personally use every day for work as well as documenting a couple other items such as video encoding and actual install time comparison with my OCZ Vertex 3 120 SSD and my WD Black 1TB 7200 drive from Win7 x64 Ultimate SP1 via USB key. Work tests include handling 1000's of large XML files; both transforming/processing and compression.

We'll provide some links to our personal threads soon that will link from this introduction thread.

Added my thread a couple days ago, need to add to this thread as well:

rubix_1011's Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD User Hardware Review

 

[JPNpower]

I'd like to see a comparison of performance changes between a drive change and an overclock. Which provides better performance overall.

If possible, I'd also like to see the advantages over a 10K drive or a hybid drive (Seagate XT or Intel SRT) But that is probably on the internet somewhere already...

 

[4745454b]

I've though about including some OCing data. But I'm pretty sure I won't have time to get that done. I would like to know which is better, putting more money into a faster CPU which will be faster overall and might load/decompress data faster, or the SSD which will provide faster read/writes. In terms of gaming of course. I know SSDs have their place, but when you have limited funds are you better off with the 3570k and a normal drive, or a 3220 and an SSD.

But as I said, I don't think I'll have time to work out OCing my system and doing the write up. I might see about doing it at a later date as I've been meaning to test this.

 

[rubix_1011]

Just a teaser of what I am seeing from the 840 so far:

I need to go back and re-run some of my tests, but that should be pretty simple to do.

 

[Proximon]

Finally a day or two off I'll have something up soon, working on some drive cloning atm.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1713329/proximon-user-review-samsung-840-pro-256gb.html

 

[JPNpower]

Oh yeah, I do know the wonderful aspects of the 8pro40, so what are the weak points?

 

[4745454b]

Price if you can't afford it. It's currently $240 on newegg right now. If you can't swing that, that's a big negative. Once I had it on the right controller and it was working, I didn't see any issues with it. Just pure speed.

 

[JPNpower]

Price if you can't afford it. It's currently $240 on newegg right now. If you can't swing that, that's a big negative. Once I had it on the right controller and it was working, I didn't see any issues with it. Just pure speed.

People willingly shed $1000 for a graphics card, or $300 on a fancy case. I think I can shell out a petty $240 for leading edge storage.

 

[4745454b]

People that do that are few and far between. Keep in mind that most PCs out there are running some sort of onboard GPI/IGP. I've recently joined the "elite" as I have 4 monitors hooked up to my PC. (No eyefinity yet, I prefer extended for all of them believe it or not.) I have $700+ in my GPU, monitors, etc alone. Most people have $700 PCs or less. The people you talked about have no problem dropping that for an SSD. But when "most" people have PCs that they bought at Walmart/Best Buy for <$500, you aren't going to buy a $240 SSD. The price per GB is really the only drawback to these drives.

 

[rubix_1011]

I concur- price point of the 840 is in that fuzzy area that can be JUST outside what someone might value as being acceptable for Price/GB. A 120/128GB SSD would make more sense, but then you have to start asking whether they know how to re-allocate a platter drive for mass storage as a 120/128 isn't going to meet the average user's needs.

However, the 840 does have speed if you have the SATA 3 channel to run it and the capacity is almost at a sweet spot for most people...especially for laptop users (when you consider many budget laptops run 320-500GB drives) as this would be a beneficial boost without upgrading to an entirely new device.

If you are building a mini-ITX case, a decent capacity SSD paired with a good capacity 2.5" HDD would give you what you need in a very small footprint.

 

[ZippyPinhead]

The 840 Pro and the price increase over the 840 EVO just doesn't seem justified(for typical home users that is). I've seen a lot of 840 Pro vs. 840 EVO benchmarks and it seems like the EVO in both benchmarks and real world use makes a lot more sense with comparable performance across the board.

 

[Tseg]

I think the main difference deals with longevity relative to write cycles. I absolutely agree a "typical" home user probably will notice little difference but if one uses intensive applications and is writing 50GB to 75GB a day the EVO may become used up before it is outdated. I cannot imagine the 840 Pro, especially 256GB or larger, getting used up due to write cycles before one will be wanting to upgrade to whatever the latest technology is (years down the road).

Of course, who would think a "typical" home user may be writing 5GB - 15GB per day 5 or 10 years ago? Perhaps by 2020 home users may be writing over 100GB per day?

 

[ZippyPinhead]

I think the main difference deals with longevity relative to write cycles. I absolutely agree a "typical" home user probably will notice little difference but if one uses intensive applications and is writing 50GB to 75GB a day the EVO may become used up before it is outdated. I cannot imagine the 840 Pro, especially 256GB or larger, getting used up due to write cycles before one will be wanting to upgrade to whatever the latest technology is (years down the road).

Of course, who would think a "typical" home user may be writing 5GB - 15GB per day 5 or 10 years ago? Perhaps by 2020 home users may be writing over 100GB per day?

Yeah but with even heavy writing cycles, by the time the useful cycle limit of the EVO is reached it would I assume already be outdated by YEARS anyway. Even under heavy use I cant see the cycle limit being reached within 4-5 years time...........am I wrong?

 

[Tseg]

I think the main difference deals with longevity relative to write cycles. I absolutely agree a "typical" home user probably will notice little difference but if one uses intensive applications and is writing 50GB to 75GB a day the EVO may become used up before it is outdated. I cannot imagine the 840 Pro, especially 256GB or larger, getting used up due to write cycles before one will be wanting to upgrade to whatever the latest technology is (years down the road).

Of course, who would think a "typical" home user may be writing 5GB - 15GB per day 5 or 10 years ago? Perhaps by 2020 home users may be writing over 100GB per day?

Yeah but with even heavy writing cycles, by the time the useful cycle limit of the EVO is reached it would I assume already be outdated by YEARS anyway. Even under heavy use I cant see the cycle limit being reached within 4-5 years time...........am I wrong?

From what I read, the Pro should provide 3K cycles and the EVO should provide 1K cycles (but could be more). 250GB x 1000 cycles = 250TB total writes (or 250K GB). 5 years x 365 days = 1825 days. 250,000GB / 1825 days = 137GB writes every single day for 5 years to totally degrade the SSD... likely experiencing significant performance fall-off leading up to that point. If there is a desire to keep for 10 years, writes would have to be less than 70GB per day.

In summary, only extremely heavy users may use it up in 5 years (and that still may be difficult)... but hard to say what "extremely heavy usage" may look like past 5 years. With that said, if one is considering a 120GB EVO the assessment above gets cut by more than half.