Samsung 840 EVO SSD 750GB review

The Samsung 840 Evo is one of the first SSDs we’ve seen to come in capacities as high as 750GB and 1TB. This is significant as, until now, one of the biggest drawbacks of using an SSD was the limited storage space.

Although Samsung continues to sell 840 Basic and 840 Pro-series SSDs, none of these older SSDs come in capacities as huge as 750GB, and the older models aren’t substantially cheaper. The 840 Pro series does have a five year warranty, though, while the 840 Evo is limited to just three years.

However, the 840 Evo has the edge when it comes to performance, easily speeding ahead of Samsung’s older SSDs. The 750GB 840 Evo reviewed here stormed through our benchmarks, writing large files at a blistering 557MB/s and reading them at a scorching 433MB/s. It was also very fast at transferring small files, writing them at 165.6MB/s and reading them at 94MB/s. Compared to our current Best Buy SSD, the Crucial 480GB M500, it’s a few MB/s faster. These scores easily make the Evo one of the fastest SSDs we’ve seen.

Like Samsung’s other 840 SSDs, the 840 Evo has a triple-core MEX controller and uses triple-level NAND flash so it can store three bits of information per storage cell rather than just two. The 120, 250 and 500GB Evos will likely be a bit slower than the 750GB and 1TB models as the latter have 1GB of DDR2 cache memory, while the former have just 256MB or 512MB. The other 840 SSDs have followed this pattern as well with lower capacity models also having less cache.

Although Samsung does sell the 840 Evo SSDs as a kit including a bracket for mounting the 2.5in disk inside a 3.5in drive bay along with the necessary screws and disk cloning software, these kits aren’t as widely available as the bare disk. The disk cloning software is freely downloadable though from www.samsung.com.

Given the Evo’s excellent performance and high capacities, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it would be very expensive. The 750GB model costs just 53p per gigabyte though which is not just in line with other SSDs, but also makes it one of the best value SSDs we’ve seen. We can’t find fault with the 750GB Evo – if you’ve that’s been sitting on the fence about switching away from a hard disk, then this is the SSD to go for.