Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD Review (500GB) – Exceptional Performance in a Large mSATA Capacity

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

A primary focus at Technology X is to relate our testing situations and equipment to that of the consumer. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

For analytical purposes, Technology X uses benchmark software that is easily accessible for the consumer. Furthermore, our equipment is only “fine tuned” using the SSD Optimization Guide, meaning that CPU clock speeds have not been adjusted. 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.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO 5.5.0

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

We can see that Samsung has enabled us to monitor the SSD through its life cycle by the way of SMART attribute identification, and we can also see that the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD is equipped with TRIM.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

As we can see here, the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD performance is at the greater end of the SATA 3 spectrum, with great write speeds in the lower KB file sizes. The SSD has read speeds of  556MB/s and write speeds of  536MB/s. Let’s take a deeper look with incompressible data, which is more common for everyday use.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (oFill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music.

We ran the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data, but the results returned with nearly identical scores, so we have only included the results for random data samples.

We can see that the read and write scores are very similar to that of the scores of ATTO, with just a slight dip in performance. It is also visible that after the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD has been formatted, the totally capacity available is 466GB.