Samsung 840 EVO 256GB & 500GB mSATA SSD Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅14-02-14
Packaging & Closer Look


The diminutive mSATA drive arrives packaged in a gun metal grey cardboard box, around the same size as a 3.5" mechanical drive but weighing much less. You would be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing contained within were it not for the plastic blister pack providing some structure to the thin packaging.


Flipping the box over we find scant details of the product inside other than it comes with a 3 year limited warranty. Our sample had no details regarding the size of the drive inside but we would be surprised if the retail examples did not have some form of capacity identification via a sticker which would double up as a seal to the product.


The 250GB version pictured above is slightly different from the 500GB & 1TB versions in that there are 2 NAND IC's missing from underneath the product sticker. Samsung claim a massive leap in speed thanks to their write algorithm and write buffer which triples the write speed when comparing the 120GB models and doubling it for the 250GB model.


The rear of the module features a further 2 NAND packages, the Samsung 3-Core MEX Controller and the DRAM Cache module. The drive includes an AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption engine for file security meaning should you lose your laptop, your data will remain secure.

Let's take a look at our test setup for today's models...

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