Samsung 840 Pro: The Makings Of A New King
Although we've had it for a very limited time, Samsung's 840 Pro is making a good first impression in our lab. It's very quick, topping a majority of our benchmark charts. Moreover, it achieves its great performance while using less power than its competition. This makes the 840 Pro the fastest, most efficient SSD we've seen to date.
Of course, we have to point out that the competition isn't too far behind. OCZ's Vertex 4 and Corsair's Neutron GTX both approach the 840 Pro's sequential read and write performance, lagging slightly in random I/O. Remember also that the SSDs at the top of our benchmarks are all very fast. We'd bet money that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Samsung's 830 and 840 Pro in an average desktop environment, on two systems sitting next to each other. The point is that you want an SSD in your machine. Making that jump from magnetic to solid-state storage is huge. From there, reliability, capacity, and cost are probably your biggest concerns. It's good to know you have the fastest SSD around, but when second-fastest is still very fast, the distinction isn't as meaningful.
Fortunately, Samsung fares pretty well, no matter how you evaluate it. The company covers this 840 Pro with a five-year warranty. That's as much as we could hope for from a storage device, and pretty much industry-leading alongside a couple of other distinguished names. We run Samsung 470s in all of our test beds in Tom's Hardware labs around the world, and not one of them has suffered any sort of failure. The same cannot be said for some of the other brands included in today's story.
| Cost Breakdown | MSRP | Market Price | Price Per GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung 840 Pro 64 GB | $100 | - | $1.56 |
| Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB | $150 | - | $1.17 |
| Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB | $270 | - | $1.05 |
| Samsung 840 Pro 512 GB | $600 | - | $1.17 |
| Samsung 830 64 GB | $100 | $100 | $1.56 |
| Samsung 830 128 GB | - | $140 | $1.09 |
| Samsung 830 256 GB | - | $220 | $0.86 |
| Samsung 830 512 GB | - | $570 | $1.11 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 64 GB | - | $65 | $1.02 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 128 GB | - | $100 | $0.78 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 256 GB | - | $200 | $0.78 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 512 GB | - | $400 | $0.78 |
Really, the biggest question mark is price, then. Samsung's 830 has found its way into our Best SSDs For The Money column on several occasions for attractive promotions the company was running, bringing pricing down to levels we couldn't ignore.
Suggested retail pricing on the 840 Pro family lines up pretty closely to the 830 drives. However, in the face of stiff competition from OCZ's Vertex 4, Plextor's M5 Pro, and Corsair's Neutron GTX, we're curious to see if Samsung gets more aggressive on some of the shopping sites we like to use. The 830 actually debuted at prices below what Samsung had us expect, so it's not hard to imagine the same thing happening here. Should that be the case, we're almost certain the 840 Pro will be the enthusiast-oriented SSD to own. It'd be premature of us to roll out an award. But we'll be keeping an eye out for these drives on shelves, and you might see special recognition conferred as we get more time with the 840 Pro.
