Samsung is a very large player in the solid state drive market, but you may not have known. This is because they sell their drives in bulk to companies like Apple to use in their products. That is why they are not an known in the consumer or enthusiast market. In fact Samsung is the largest producer of flash memory in the world. One thing that is great about Samsung solid state drives is that everything inside is made by Samsung, the NAND, controller and DRAM cache. This makes it very easy for Samsung to correct issues or fix problems because everything is done in-house. We saw this on Samsung’s 830 Series solid state drive and the big difference between the 830 and 840 is that the 840 Series uses TLC NAND chips instead of MLC. We will get to the difference in just a bit. The controller on the 840 Series has also been updated. The 120GB version we are testing today has read and write speeds of 530MB/s and 130MB/s respectively so it sort of fits into the entry-level segment. Let’s take a look…
Special thanks to Samsung for providing the 840 Series 120GB solid state drive to review.
Specifications
| Product Type | Solid State Drive |
| Design | 2.5″ 7mm (Ultraslim) Form Factor |
| Series | 840 |
| Capacity | 120GB |
| Sequential Read Speed | Up to 530MB/s |
| Sequential Write Speed | Up to 130MB/s |
| Random Read Speed | Up to 85K IOPS |
| Random Write Speed | Up to 32K IOPS |
| Power Consumption (W) | .15W |
| Voltage | 5V ± 5% |
Packaging
The 840 Series solid state drive comes in a box that is not much larger than the drive itself. On the front there is a photo of the drive and it lets us know the capacity, which is 120GB. Moving along to the back it lists some of the main features and let’s us know the speeds, which for the 120GB version are 530MB/s read and 130MB/s write.
For a full video unboxing be sure to check out our video below.
