Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD Review – 1TB mSATA SSD Capacity Along With TurboWrite and Great Security Features

TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

 SSD Testing at TSSDR differs slightly depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise SSDs.  For consumer SSDs, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, although CPU C States have not been changed at all.  Benchmarks for consumer testing are also benchmarks with a fresh drive so, not only can we verify that manufacturer specifications are in line but also, so the consumer can replicate our tests to confirm that they have an SSD that is top-notch.  We even provide links to most of the benchmarks used in the report.

Enterprise testing is significantly different as we explore performance in steady state, explore drive latency, and do our best to follow SNIA test protocol.  As the Samsung 840 EVO family of SSDs are as consumer retail products, we are going to be following our regular consumer review tests and, if need be, we can later return for additional testing. For our testing today, the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD will be connected to our systems Intel SATA port by way of a mSATA to SATA 3 adapter.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This new PCIe Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to be quiet, Corsair, Crucial, Intel, EVGA and InWin for their support in our project.  Our choice of components is very narrow, in that, we choose only what we believe to be among the best available and links are provided to each that will assist in hardware pricing and availability, should the reader be interested in purchase.

PC CHASSIS:	InWin D-Frame Open Air Chassis
MOTHERBOARD:	ASUS Maximus VI Z87 MotherBoard
CPU:	Intel Core i7-4770K CPU
CPU COOLER:	Corsair H100i CPU Cooler
POWER SUPPLY:	be quiet Dark Power Pro 10 1000W PSU
SYSTEM COOLING:	be quiet Silent Wings 2 PC Fans
GRAPHICS CARD:	EVGA GTX 770 Superclocked with ACX Cooler
MEMORY:	Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 1600Mhz Memory
KEYBOARD:	Corsair Vengeance K95 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
MOUSE:	Corsair Vengeance M95 MMO/RTS Laser Mouse
ROUTER:	NetGear R6300 AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router
HBA	HighPoint RocketU 1144C 4 x USB 3.0 20Gb/s HBA

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BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark Vantage.  In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and, also, to provide validation to results already obtained.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER 5.5.0

Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, ‘power on’ information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not grayed out as with AAM and APM.

Samsung has also enabled us to monitor this SSD through its life cycle by way of SMART attribute identification.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

Performance highs of 555MB/s read and 532MB/s write are at the top of the SATA 3 spectrum and excellent speeds to start things off.  More noticeable, however, is the fact that both read and write disk performance hits SATA 3 speeds right at the 8KB file size, something rarely seen in any SSD.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

Performance results a bit lower than we saw in ATTO is typical of crystal DiskMark and this assist in our reasoning to providing several separate benchmark tests.  We can also see that, once the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD is formatted, total capacity available to the user is 932GB.