Samsung has a strong record when put a sight at history and it does not matter what type of product they made, they produce reliable and performance with stability. Today we review as Samsung SSD , 840 Pro series of 256GB storage capacity.In Late September Samsung launched the 840 Pro and 840 SSD series, both using the new Samsung MDX controller. It turned out that the Samsung 840 Pro was the fastest SSD at time, even if the OCZ Vector has now managed to catch up. The Samsung 840 stood out because it was the first SSD to employ triple level cell memory. This makes the SSDs cheaper to make.Interestingly, the new firmware revisions are sort of a step back. Samsung changed its TRIM policy for the 840 family, an adjustment that lowered write performance for drives that had been filled to capacity. In the latest firmware spins, the TRIM policy has reverted to match the behavior of the 830 Series.
SSD 840 vs. SSD 840 Pro:
Samsung has also announced the SSD 840, designed with triple-level cell (TLC) NAND and intended for mainstream use. We have not seen specifications yet for the SSD 840, but we do know that this is the first commercialization of TLC SSD technology and that the SSD 840 will have a three year warranty compared to the SSD 840 Pro's five years. While OCZ was the first to announce TLC-based SSDs, Samsung's SSD 840 will be first to market. It will be particularly interesting to see Samsung’s endurance benchmarks for a TLC NAND drive, as in our briefing on the drive they claimed a 20-year useful life of both drives, which sounds fantastical given the known limitations of TLC NAND. To date TLC NAND has been found suitable only for applications like USB drives, SD cards and certain lightweight embedded applications.
As it turns out, the 840 family suffered a more serious firmware issue before the drives were released to the general public. The samples initially sent out to reviewers had pre-production firmware that failed to update the metadata correctly after a secure erase, causing drives to meet an early demise in certain circumstances. This early firmware was confined to media and engineering samples, Samsung says, and the problem was fixed in the firmware installed on drives sold to consumers.The new memory is Samsung 21nm Toggle NAND complete with a 400Mbps interface. Meanwhile, the controller is Samsung's fourth-generation effort, known as MDX. The chip's spec include three ARM Cortex R4 cores running at around 300MHz and the same controller you'll find in the much cheaper 840 non-pro. the old 830 series drive had a triple-core controller based on ARM cores and running at 220MHz and Toggle 1.0 NAND rated at 133Mbps. So the big difference in terms of performance you can likely trace to the flash memory in each drive.As for the firmware, we don't have any new data to divulge. But we can confirm that the foreground garbage collection feature from the 830's MCX controller remains, which bodes well for long-term reliability.
On a related note, the 840 Pro comes with a standard five-year warranty, while the plain 840 makes do with three-year cover. Rounding out the hardware is 512MB of 1,066MHz DDR2 DRAM cache memory. By default, spare memory area is set to around seven per cent of capacity, though that's adjustable using Samsung SSD Magician tool.
SSD 840 Pro Specifications
Capacities: 64GB ($99), 128GB ($149), 256GB ($269), 512GB ($599)
Form Factor: 2.5-inch, 7mm
Interface: Serial ATA 3.0, up to 6GB/sec
Controller: 3-core MDX controller (300MHz)
Memory Type: 2x-nm class DDR2 toggle-mode NAND (400 Mbps)
AES-256 full drive encryptions
Warranty: Five (5) years.
Now lets take a look at BenchMarks results....
- Good Design and build Quality.
- Top class Performance.
- Reliable.
- TLC flash Memory.
- Utility softwares Included.
- Consistent latencies.
- Performance is a little bit Shaky.
- Not much improvement over 830 SSDs as Expected.
