Samsung Announces 840 SSD

SSD Magician 3.2 software dated October 23rd

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Samsung-SSD-Magician.shtml

 

I've been using Samsung Magician 3.2 for the past day or so. There's a new feature that estimates the drive's life expectancy based on S.M.A.R.T. data. Pretty neat. Otherwise, I'm not sure what else is new. Still need to go through it.

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Well, took the plunge! The 840 PRO 256GB just arrived from Newegg... backing everything up then about to install. This will be my first SSD, curious to see how it compares to my HDDs... I understand it will only be running SATA II in my G73 until I upgrade machines, but excited none the less! Plan to do a clean install of Win8Pro on the SDD and keep the 750GB in the second bay as main storage of games, etc... Am doing some quick reading, from posts I've seen it appears I want to partition the drive down a bit ~20% or so and leave the rest unallocated. Have I understood this correct? Thanks

 

Yeah, the 'unallocated' part is correct.

Just a note: when you do the clean install - have only the SSD installed. This will ensure that no funny business occurs and Windows will NEED both drives just to boot up.

Good luck!

 

leaving unallocated area is really dumb IMO. Better allocate the area but leave it empty if you insist. At least if you need the space you have it right away.

 

'Unallocated' area and simply 'unused' area are not treated the same.

It's not dumb: if you want the highest sustained performance over time with the lowest WA, this is the only option we have at this point with current SSD's. And if you really, really need the space - any modern O/S will let you 'Expand' the partition to it's fullest capacity in mere seconds.

 

Thanks, got it up and running last night, curious though I didn't see your post about only having the SSD installed until this morning... Any issues I should be on the lookout for by having both installed?

Install seems to have gone well, she's definitely snappy but I know any SSD would be snappy compared to my usual HDD experience. Setting up drivers now, used this as an opportunity to get W8 Pro setup.

Boot time with Windows 8 was a ridiculous improvement, and with the SSD improved yet again.

So far no issues with the 840 Pro, running stable at this point. Left about 25GB of unallocated.

 

If you want to test (while you're still in testing mode...) if the second drive is needed to boot Windows: simply remove it and see if Windows boots up normally/properly.

If it did - no problem; keep installing your drivers as usual.

If it didn't: I would be doing a re-install about this time with no second HDD installed in the system.


Why are we 'testing' this? Because if your secondary, 'data' drive, ever needs to be replaced - you won't be able to if Windows needs it to boot from.

You may never need it: but if/when you do - this is one of those nightmare situations that is easily avoided by doing this simple test now (when you don't 'need' to) rather than scrambling to get to your data and/or system/programs when under a deadline/etc.

Good luck.

 

Cool, thanks for the tip. I'll give it a shot and see, as I do occasionally swap HDD's around and that would be a problem if it surfaced down the road.

Thanks for the help.

 

Regarding the unallocated (over-porvisioned) space on these Samsung SSDs, I usually just use Magician's recommended amount of:

23.80GB for my 830 256GB (W7)
23.80GB for my 830 256GB (W8)
11.90GB for my 470 128GB

I am now dual booting 7 and 8 so Magician recommended 23.80GB for each OS partition. I've never had any major slowdowns even when filling my SSDs more that 50%. Then again, I'm not a power user but I also don't baby my computer and just use it without much worry. This could also be attributed to the works of TRIM, grabage collection and other SSD-optimizing services (can't remember right now).

Also looking forward to hearing more about user experiences with the 840 and 840 Pro.

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Actually, that's 23.80GB recommended for the whole SSD, not for each partition. That makes for a 10% OP.

 

The Pro Series are still not available here in Norway and only in US. Newegg and Amazon refuse to ship them here to Norway.

But luckily I found an Ebay user that sell them. So I just bought the 256GB PRO. Can`t wait to test it out

 

830 is better an 840?

 

840 Pro is better than 830 but not 840 normal. But after launching 840 series Samsung slashed the price of 830, So you can find good deal on 830 and save some bucks.

 

The regular version of Samsung 840 have less power consumption than 830. 1 Watt less. That is probably its only advantage so you might get some better battery life out of it compared to 830.

But 250GB 830 is like $60 cheaper and it performs the same so I would rather buy that instead.

But with 840 PRO its an entirely different story. Its much faster than 830. Sadly we don`t have any real world tests to show the difference, but atleast in synthetic benchmarks its miles ahead. And it draws 2W less than 830. So if you want the best of the best, this is the drive

 

why do people even bother looking ay snythetics?

do you live in the synthetic world? or the real world?

 

Read my post again. I said "sadly we don`t have any real world tests..."

But we have this which shows that the 840 PRO is 15 seconds faster than Samsung 830. And since I have the money, I have no interest in buying an inferior product

 

that was my point....if you don't have real world data. then you have no basis for saying one drive is faster than another. regardless of whether or not it is.

 

Is the 840 Pro 512GB available online at this moment? I checked newegg and it's showing out of stock

 

chukwe, did you not just answer your own question?

 

Amazon is out of stock too

 

Has anyone on here received a 512GB? Starting to think they do not exist, lol.

 

Amazon has these up, 19 left in stock

 

Itching to buy one of the 256GB 840 PRO but kinda freaked out of the premature deaths in Anand's tests. Anyone seen a real life failure so far?

I see several 5-star reviews on newegg. Looks like not that bad.

--

 

You pay your money and take your chances. Samsung, Intel, Seagate, Hitachi, MS, Apple... nobody is 'perfect'.

I would love to try an 840 PRO (just to 'see' for myself...) but knowing Samsung, I don't think I would be too impressed. For new/mission critical builds: I will still prefer the proven (in my use) Intel 520 Series and the Crucial M4's, along with the Sandisk Extreme models for the 'less mission-critical builds' (all 'recommended' are ONLY: 240GB/256GB except for the M4: which can be either 256GB or 512GB capacities - depending on the storage/use needed - to ensure the fastest, most sustainable SSD experience I demand from my setups).

I DO want to be proved wrong though.

When will Intel partner with Samsung to give us the ultimate SSD?

One with SATA Express (basically; bootable PCI-E),
Capacities that make sense in 2013 (or whenever they release it),
Guaranteed MINIMUM performance claims (like the S3700 Intel DC SSD),
Prices that make considering other products more like gambling, instead of saving money,
Compatibility that is a given, instead of (once more) a gamble,
Firmware that is so stable, reliability is not even questioned anymore (like HDD's...).

If any manufacturer (or some combination of them) can give the above today; they wouldn't be wondering why their sales are not where they expected...

 

Received the 512GB 840 Pro, I needed to upgrade for space as I had a crucial M4 256 GB.... Seems to work fine so far, although there is not a noticeable in performance.

 

For those interested, here is a crystaldiskmark of my 512GB 840 Pro.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 498.847 MB/s
Sequential Write : 481.072 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 427.101 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 445.980 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 23.008 MB/s [ 5617.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 49.589 MB/s [ 12106.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 400.202 MB/s [ 97705.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 333.511 MB/s [ 81423.6 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 32.0% (152.4/476.8 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/11/24 11:08:51
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64

 

You wouldn't have the 256GB M4's score would you? Just for a complete comparison...

 

and why would you want that ? ... to see the complete humiliation of the M4's performance compared to what was just posted ?

 

No, to show just how much benchmark 'scores' mean NOTHING in the real world. lol...

doc0075579 said:

 

I don't, but I can throw it back in later and run a test if you like. Again, I bought it because I was in the market for more space and figured I would give the Pro a try. Its fast, that's for sure, but I would not buy one if you already have an M4 or something similar and don't need more space as there is very little real world difference.

 

You definitely don't have to do that for me (I know already...).

But thanks for the confirmation that the difference in 'feel' is not upgrade worthy.

 

Impressive. At the moment I'm leaning toward this brand in preparation for my new machine I'm expecting come Jan. I decided to take the holiday sale opportunity to load up on peripherals first. I had originally considered the Kingston Hyper X, then looked at the Crucial M4.

I'm still undecided though as price will be the final determining factor. After all, I could get a pair of M4s for the price of one Hyper X. My other consideration would be a system configured with one Brand X SSD and a 512-1TB HDD.

 

I'd have to disagree - having recently shopped around for an SSD and having tried (and returned) the Crucial M4 and Samsung 830 before settling on a Plextor M5P, my experience was pretty much in line with CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD scores.

The M4 in particular was so slow that I found myself either Alt+Tabbing and doing other things or gazing absentmindedly out the window while it struggled to save my multi-gigabyte datasets to disk. Losing concentration has a disastrous impact on productivity, and productivity means a lot more than "nothing" in the real world.

 

Awesome looks great, thanks for sharing!

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Since these are two of the top manufacturers of SSD, I suspect you were experiencing other issues. The Plextor indeed is fast, but you make it sound as it the other two are HDDs in comparison. This can hardly be the case.

 

You forget tiller recommends at least 32GB of RAM and a quad core Intel i-something CPU minimum for forum use! Of course then benchmarks are worthy and you can "feel" how much "faster in the real world performance" the many browser tabs are opening in comparison to slow AMD cpus. (/sarcasm, no offense, just joking, could'nt help myself )

But yes, a lot of these operations/cycles/functions/etc. are happening so fast it really doesn't seem different until you measure it with the right tool.

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Lol almost all 512GB Samsung PRO's are out of stock here in Europe.... insane

 

Intel raising the baseline of what an SSD should be is keeping Samsung on its toes. Both of these companies are looking to avoid all mistakes as possible but you'll eventually run into some trouble. I can't believe they're sold out. Maybe its an inventory/quantity availability issue from Samsung or these retailers?

 

Bit the bullet on a 256gb Samsumg 840 TCL. Got it for $160 and it came with a far cry 3 key. From the review I read (forget which one, sorry) these came in as the budget version of the 840 pros. Mostly the same but read/writes were a bit slower. And because it's a tlc drive it won't last as long, but they said they're still listed at 7 years which is more than enough.

I think the deal is still going on Newegg so if anyone wanted a taste of the new 840s but didn't like the price, I'd grab them before they're gone! (Mine should arrive sometime this week and I'll see how it stacks up against the crucial m4 it's replacing.

 

Well, for what it's worth, I installed a 256GB 840 PRO at the same time I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro a few weeks ago, performance has been a great improvement over my 750GB 7.2K HDD, but I do realize W8 is a big part of the boot improvement.... having a laptop that boots almost instantly is awesome though!

Has been perfectly reliable so far without issues. I can't get a proper performance result as I'm only using SATA II on my laptop, but look forward to enjoying in the next machine.

 

I bought the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB on Friday that came with a free copy of Assassin's Creed III for $269. Waiting for it to arrive, though cant use it until my new laptop arrives, which will take at least a week.
BTW I checked on Tigerdirect yesterday and they also have it for $269 but with NO TAX, but I don't think they include the free game code.

 

The 830 was fine. The reason I returned it was because I caught the M5P on sale about a week later that made it cheaper than the 830.

The M4 on the other hand was slow - it took 30+ seconds to save my ~8 GB file, whereas the 830 and M5P could complete the operation in about 20 seconds. I really wish this laptop had more than 1 drive bay, because RAID would help a lot here.

 

Now your "slow" comments makes sense. The rapid array was introduced because of the limitation of mechanical devices. That limitation has been overcome with the application of flash and solid state media.

 

I just received my 840 Pro and I am super excited. Too bad I can't use it until my laptop arrives

Also on the installation guide it shows the SATA-USB adapter for data migration, but there wasn't any in the box.
Am I supposed to buy it separately or it was supposed to be included?

 

My Samsung 840 Pro.
Long story short: MSI only includes SATA2 for your SSDs, unless they are mSATA

 

I'm in the same boat, but frankly nothing to worry about, you do realize that the bottom two scores is what's important ... right

my 830 below

http://i48.tinypic.com/10oilno.jpg

 

Yes, 4Ks are extremely important which is why I`m even more depressed since they run on half the speed on what its suppose to. Just wish I knew before dishing out $280 on a SSD. I guess its still a lot faster than HDDs and I can always keep it til next notebook that have SATA3 though.
Here is what it should look like:

 

Wow, I'm surprised that 4K (QD1) performance suffers so much, given how that's more of a latency measurement than a throughput measurement.

Also, how did MSI wire your laptop? I thought OEMs always used the 2x SATA 6 Gbps ports for HDDs, so even with a mSATA slot there should still be a 6 Gbps connector for the 2.5" bay.

 

Nope. they use the 2x SATA III ports in the first port where the mSATA RAID is supposed to be...