The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
REPORT ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION
When Samsung introduced the 840 Pro last year, it was easy to call it the best consumer drive on the market and shower it with awards. It delivered great performance at a good price. With the SM843, the analysis isn’t so easy.
The first problem is that the SM843 doesn’t fit into any of the traditional enterprise categories. In the past you only had one type of enterprise drive; high endurance, high performance drives that cost as much as most PCs. This one-size-fits-all approach has been losing appeal over the last few years. In fact, many enterprise customers are frequently using consumer drives as a dirt cheap, disposable solution. This is exactly what the SM843 is aiming to replace. It is not a peer of the S3700 or the P400m, it is a replacement for the Intel SSD 320 series.
When you look at it that way, the SM843 becomes much more desirable, but it doesn’t make up for many shortcomings.
When you think of enterprise SSDs, you think of high-endurance NAND, data loss protection, redundancy, etc. The SM843 has none of this. Other than the custom, enterprise-oriented firmware, it is hard to really differentiate this drive from the 840 Pro and other high-end consumer drives. That is going to be a real challenge going forward, especially when companies like Crucial/Micron are migrating enterprise features to consumer drives.
With that said, the SM843, for its intended application, performs great. Samsung’s pricing should completely undercut most ‘enterprise’ SSDs by a wide margin.
As companies continue to complete their product portfolios, we will get a much better feeling as to how the SM843 stacks up against the competition in the coming months. Stay tuned!