Upgrading your PC with a Samsung 840 SSD is the most economical way to breathe new life into an aging PC. The 840 reads, writes and multi-tasks at incredible speeds, enhancing boot-up speed, application loading and multi-tasking performance. It’s more than an upgrade, it’s a complete transformation of your PC.
$ 116.56
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Good but only if you can get it at the right price,
First of all, the Samsung 840 uses triple-level cell (TLC) memory vs. the multi-level cell (MLC) memory used for almost all other SSDs. So what is the difference between TLC and MLC? With TLC memory, 3 bits of information (8 possible values) are stored per cell instead of the 2 bits (4 possible values) in MLC memory. This might sound better but it also means that the cells are used more and there is less voltage fault tolerance. In the most simple terms, you can think of cells being “filled” or “emptied” by applying voltage. When 3 bits (8 possible values) of information are stored per cell, the SSD may have to apply voltage to the entire cell multiple times even though just one bit of information is encoded (depending on the bit being changed). The multiple voltage applications to each cell also slows down the write speeds and causes more wear in general.
Performance-wise, the Samsung 840 is actually worse than the previous generation Samsung 830. On the Passmark benchmarks, it is slightly lower than the OCZ Agility 4 which uses asynchronous MLC NAND flash.
Right now, the top three SSDs (best selling and best reviews) on Amazon are the OCZ Vertex 4, Samsung 830, and the Crucial M4. However, all three of these SSDs are cheaper and they perform better than the Samsung 840. Eventually, the TLC NAND should mean that the Samsung 840 will sell for less because less NAND is used. However, it is not worth it right now. To be safe, I would say that you should wait until the drive is at least 10-20{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} cheaper than the three drives above due to the uncertainty of how it will perform in the long run.
One puzzling thing is that I couldn’t find any mean time before failure (MTBF) estimates for the 840, while the MTBF for the 20nm MLC based 840 Pro is 1.5 million hours (lower than the 2 million hours for many 25nm MLC drives). Also, it is interesting that the drives are not 128GB, 256GB, 512GB. There are probably three reasons for this. The TLC NAND manufacturing process has lower yields so they have to “turn off” a portion of the cells to account for this. This is similar to what Nvidia does for their GPUs (16 functional streaming multiprocessors become GTX 580, 14-15 functional streaming multiprocessors become a GTX 570, etc…) Another possibility is that they anticipate that there will be more wear to the TLC NAND so that there is an unused memory bank to replace any dead cells. The third and most likely reason is a combination of the two, i.e. a portion of the turned off cells are nonfunctional due to the new manufacturing process and the remaining portion of the turned off cells are reserved for replacement.
I handle tech purchase decisions for my department and so I bought one Samsung 840 to test for due diligence but won’t buy more until they become much cheaper.
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12/4/12 Update
As predicted, these drives dropped in price quite a bit. TLC NAND is about 25{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} cheaper than MLC NAND so that the price of these drives should converge to a ratio of around 75{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} of the price of a MLC SSD in the long run.
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|Samsung Says It All With This Solid State Drive! Or, How I Made The Slowest To Boot PC In My Home Into The Fastest One!,
I recently updated my five year old computer (B000OJ0ZTS ASUS M2A-VM HDMI AM2 AMD 690G DDR2-1066 AMD X1250 IGP ATX Motherboard) from Vista Ultimate x64 to Windows 8 Pro Media Center x64. I also updated my six year old computer from Vista Ultimate x64 to the new Windows. The processor in the five year old computer was an Athlon II x64 Black Edition with two cores running a stock 3.4 GHz, but Vista and the years of updates from Mikey had it running really slow – especially on boot, but also during use. Vista had also wreaked havoc on the computers 8 Gb of Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory – not that the old high performance Crucial DDR-2 PC6400 memory isn’t known for shorter than normal lifespans. Unfortunately, I only have one 2 Gb stick of this no longer offered Crucial RAM still working correctly for this computer, and it will soon be replaced with another brand before it starts causing more errors to the hard drive like those I have removed were causing – often forcing me to repair the OS before Windows would boot.
Well, the old hard drive wasn’t bad. After all, it was a Western Digital Caviar® SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB SATA II Hard Drive (Western Digital WD2500KSRTL Caviar SE16 250 GB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive Kit) , and one I had reviewed favorably in early June of 2006. But, the drive was dated – especially since my other computers have been using Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM and WD Enterprise OS drives that are also dated now.
Finally, the prices are coming down on SSDs, and this Samsung drive caught my eye with its 120 GB of storage – along with many favorable reviews of it on the Internet. When used for an OS drive alone, the 120 Gb size is perfect as the user won’t need the slightly increased benefit of the higher read/write found on the more expensive Samsung 250 and 500 Gb SSDs – unless they are devout gamers or heavy graphics users. So, the 120 Gb size is best for most users. SSDs are also faster than any magnetic drive and less temperature sensitive. SSDs can also take a lot of G-forces – and the 840 here, with its USB adapter, makes a great external drive if wanted. Just imagine using this drive for music storage in your car if your headunit has a capable USB port – it will work with a number of them if the music files are set up correctly.
Windows 8 and Windows 7 both have native support for SSDs, which provides for properly cleaning SSDs of errors and deleted data that will eventually slow them down (defragmenting SSDs like a magnetic drive will ruin them). Anyway, my Windows 7 Ultimate computers are still running fast with their magnetic drives. On the other hand, the five year old Windows 8 Pro Media computer running the WD2500KS drive was now running fast with the replacement of Vista Ultimate x64. Boot was only about thirty seconds from a powered shutdown, and much less from standby – as long as the hard drive wasn’t corrupted by the failing Crucial memory, and this was with only 2 GB of RAM.
Installing the SSD:
The KW model box kit includes just what is needed to replace 3.5 Desktop SATA drives along with some extras. So, the install is a fast swap – I didn’t bother using the transfer software because you need Windows 8 (or 7) to install native support for the drive. But, you also need to check BIOS on install to make sure SATA/AHCI or RAID drive settings are applied. These settings are needed for proper SSD operation before installation of the OS. Without a fresh install of Windows 8 (or 7), you can still find an add-on program that will clean the SSD – I just don’t like added programs when they can be avoided. I’ve also prefered clean OS installs on any hard drive since the days of XP – as I’ve always kept my added data on secondary drives to reserve my primary drive for the OS. I even followed that practice in RAID configurations, and dual boot configurations where I would run different OS on their own dedicated drives instead of creating multiple partitions on the same drive – fewer headaches in the event of a problem using the KISS method.
I’ll tell you, Windows 8 installed fast on the old drive using a SATA DVD reader – about twice as fast or faster than Windows 7 installs to a magnetic drive! But, it installed even faster to the new SSD. My Windows copy was an upgrade, so I had to install Vista Ultimate first – but even that was much faster on the SSD. I could be wrong, but I believe I loaded Vista, had it authorized, loaded Windows 8, and loaded Media Center, and had everything authorized in well under an hour – and the SSD had the Windows 8 native support I wanted Windows to install. Only one thing, Mickey has a bunch of (gag) updates already for Windows 8 Pro Media Center – and the OS just released last month (oh well, for $39.99…). I just set Windows Updates to install on their own in the background to keep my temper from flaring. Windows 7 never had so many updates so soon after release – and I would know…
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|Good Drive, Poor documentation,
First off, forget Norton Ghost. Even though the Samsung SSD Magician software provides a link to Symantec for a 30 day trial version of Norton Ghost, the trial version won’t clone your old HD to the new HD. Save yourself some frustration and download time by going to the Samsung Support website and downloading the Samsung Data Migration tool. Once I downloaded and installed this excellent software tool, the cloning went quickly (2-3 hrs.) and easily. I was upgrading from a 128GB Kingston SSD with about 110GB of data on it, so your mileage my vary on the cloning times. The Samsung SSD Magician software is also powerful and easy to use. I was able to optimize my Windows settings and the SSD settings in no time to get optimal performance from the SSD. The Over Provisioning, while a little scary, went well and took up about 10{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} of the overall HD space, but if this extends the life and reliability of the drive it will be worth it. Overall I’m glad I bought this SSD, however I wouldn’t recommend it to a non-techie friend or relative. The sparse (virtually nonexistent) documentation made the cloning process more frustrating than it had to be and I consider myself an advanced user. Minus one star for the poor documentation.
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