SAMSUNG 840 Series MZ-7TD500BW 2.5" 500GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: I have five SSD Samsung drives. So far I've had good Luck with all of them. Got 2 more Samsungs on the way.

Cons: Watch out for the shipping method UPS Mail Innovations Origin. It takes longer to reach your destination.

Pros: Large capacity, very fast compared to 7200 rpm HDD. My laptop boots to Fedora 16 KDE in about 12 seconds. Resume from suspend is so fast that it is done by the time the laptop lid is fully opened. Great way to rejuvenate an "old" laptop.

Cons: Buggy provided software locked up my laptop. I had to download a new version from Samsung's web site. Even so, it didn't recognize and copy my linux partitions. In the end, I booted with a Linux Live CD and used dd to clone the HDD, which fortunately was exactly the same capacity as the SDD.

Pros: Fast and Easy to install

Cons: Firmware upgrade requires directly connect Windows machine USB attached will not allow firmware upgrades. Because of this, I only have it 4 eggs.

Pros: Its an SSD, seems stable, wasnt to hot on the idea of TLC nand, but the price was unbeatable at the time. Holds alot of data for an ssd, I use it as my Steam games drive w/o any issues.

Cons: DOESNT play nice with amd sata driver.

Other Thoughts: I dont usually do reviews, but this is more a heads up to others. I had to roll back to the M$ standard sata controller after installing this drive. It doesnt play nice with AMD's sata controller, so be aware. Samsung Magician showed the drive was NOT in AHCI mode and couldnt detect what the sata connection was. A perf test showed almost minimal R/W IOPS speeds in that state. After ALOT of searching I discovered AMD sata drivers are not supported by the 840 series. Once I rolled back, a perf test showed speeds were vastly improved, altho still only 50 to 70% of the advertised "up to" speeds.

Pros: Tons of space for the price. Hard to believe you can get 500GB for this much (or little) dough! Magician software works well for the most part. Much faster than normal HDD's (duh)

Cons: The cloning software is a joke, don't even bother. While the sequential read and write speeds are fairly close to advertised speeds, the random read/write is WAY lower than promised. (Random Read: 47,000, write 42000)

Other Thoughts: For those cloning their existing OS, some special notes. Normal HDD's work a little different in how they store data than SSD's. Once you clone (using other software than what comes with this, trust me) you will need to "Align" your SSD using a program like gparted. You will see a huge speed increase after this. Once aligned, you will want to enable ACHI on your motherboard to see more speed increases. Before you can enable it you must do a quick registry update so Windows loads the proper ACHI drivers. Google aligning SSD and ACHI Registry fix to see how to do it.

If you are doing a clean OS install, Windows will automatically align the SSD and load the ACHI drivers, so you won't have to worry about it.

Pros: It's a good drive, quality build, hasn't failed yet. Neither did its 830 brothers and sisters of different storage capacity.

Cons: Not as fast as advertised, but we all know manufacturers love making up speed ratings.

Pros: Fast like an SSD. My system is limited to SATA II speeds so real world performance is not significantly greater than the INTEL 320 160GB SSD it replaced (e.g. average boot time, as report by Windows (eventID 100) on my real world i7-860 Win-7 x64 configuration: From either SDD ~37sec; From a HD was ~213sec )

Cons: I could not use the Smart Data Migration software (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html) because my system did not meet the 20% free space on source disk requirement.

I haven't had the drive long enough to comment on reliability.

Pros: Fast worked great out of the box even on my old laptop with SATA II @ 290 MB/s

Cons: Though it states there is AES encryption, I do not see the option with the SSD Magician included software.

Other Thoughts: Using bitlocker for now.
If anyone knows how to enable the supposedly built in encryption let me know.

I'm wondering if only the 840 Pro series actually have encryption??

Pros: Fast, Spacious, Low Power draw, Low heat (and all other SSD pluses), Samsung name and warranty.

Cons: TLC memory utilized (although not sure if that will matter in the end result, but has a lower p/e cycle by default), not as long of a warranty as some other drives (840 PRO).

Other Thoughts: I have found that this drive performs faster than the smaller SSD that it replaced. So far no issues and works super fast without issues seen in other first generation drives) even though it is using TLC memory which could in the end possibly cause issues (although Samsung is a respected manufacturer that will honor it's warranty so I am not worried as it will probably be replaced by newer and better technology long before the warranty is expired).

Pros: Good disk, it offers good performance for everyday computing, I'm going to try it for gaming.

Cons: The description that NewEgg offers about this product is deceiving! THEY CLAIM that the disk offers full disk encryption while it doesn't! that's one of the main things I bought it for!

Pros: Cost & quick performance for consumer users in comparison with other drives

Cons: Not so much a con as just something to be aware of. This is a TLC drive or "Triple Layer Cell" Vs the higher end MLC or "Multi Layer Cell" TLC drives have lower endurance and higher latencies (delays) than MLC drives. This is because they are packing more data into the same space (8 bits vs 4 bits into the same cell) thus it multiplies the times each cell is written to and takes slightly longer to read and write to each cell (mind you this is in nanoseconds so you won't notice much of a difference). In the end that translates to a lower lifespan in comparison to an MLC drive. That being said most ipods use TLC.

Other Thoughts: Overall this is a great drive for the price and most people won't know the difference between this and the higher end drive. If your using this drive strictly as an Operating system drive and don't plan on writing to it too many times then you'll be fine. The perfect example of this is the iPod and other MP3 Players. It uses TLC and it's a perfect application for it as you're not writing/rewriting data to the drive very often. Most of the time you're only reading the music data off the disc in order to play it.

However if you are a Power user that uses programs like photoshop or other production line software that writes swap files to the system drive or you are using this drive for networking then you'll want to save up the extra $$ for an MLC drive so you get that extra endurance

There are also SLC or (Single Layer Cell) drives which are even more durable but that technology really isn't needed unless you're doing enterprise level networking and your drive is being written to thousands of times in very short time spans.

Pros: works great

Cons: The package does NOT include "Samsung Data SmartMigration software".

The instructions direct you to download and use Norton Ghost, but don't waste your time registering and burning this software to CD like me. The Ghost + Backup package requires an unlock key which is NOT included. I thought the label on the back of the "SSD Magician" CD was the key. Not.

So I used Partitian Wizard by MiniTool instead. Unlike the instructions for Ghost, Partitian Wizard does the whole drive, every partitian, in one whack. Nice. If you use Partitian Wizard, be sure to copy the partitians WITHOUT RESIZE if you want the drive to be bootable. But you can enlarge the partitians afterwards.

Note that the special bracket for mounting SSDs is not included either, but I already had that.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer

We regret to hear of your inconvenience and would like to direct you to our "Samsung Migration S/W" download site

www.samsung.com/samsungssd (or click on link provided)

Our data migration is freely downloadable and works on all Samsung SSD's, even on our previous generation models.

Again we regret to have caused you any trouble using our product.

Thank you for choosing Samsung SSD

Samsung SSD Team

External Link(s):

Samsung Migration S/W|