Samsung 840 Pro SSD Review @ [H]

Hey guys!

I got this drive and may get another, is it best to keep it in raid or just in AHCI mode? I never have used raid and have:
3 WD Red 3TB drived
3 Seagate 1.5GB Drives.
 
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Sigh was installing my new 840 Pro SSD and I decided I wanted it oriented a different way. Pulled the power cable on it and somehow snapped a tiny piece of the plastic L-Bracket part. Ugh. I'm pretty sure it doesn't affect anything (I don't have a mobo yet, was just preplanning wiring, etc) but still peeved that it snapped off so easily.
 
These 830/840 drives are great but the Magician software can be a PITA. The good news is that it uninstalls cleanly, almost without a trace, if ever you do decide to use it and run into sleep or other issues. See this thread;

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2308308

“Usually the problems are freezing or the system staying on a black screen. People usually have to reboot the machine a few times to get into the OS again. This type of issue is seen in SSD across the board not just Samsung SSDs”.

I concur that the latest Magician 4.1 sets wake timers if ever it's run. Disabling the Windows startup component helps until you run the program. Disabling wake timers in your power plan is one workaround. Haven't come across the wakeup freezing issue, that Samsung gives as justification for the wake timer, with Samsung or Intel SSDs.
 
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Eldata said:
These 830/840 drives are great but the Magician software can be a PITA. The good news is that it uninstalls cleanly, almost without a trace, if ever you do decide to use it and run into sleep or other issues. See this thread;

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2308308

“Usually the problems are freezing or the system staying on a black screen. People usually have to reboot the machine a few times to get into the OS again. This type of issue is seen in SSD across the board not just Samsung SSDs”.

I concur that the latest Magician 4.1 sets wake timers if ever it's run. Disabling the Windows startup component helps until you run the program. Disabling wake timers in your power plan is one workaround. Haven't come across the wakeup freezing issue, that Samsung gives as justification for the wake timer, with Samsung or Intel SSDs.
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This describes it almost totally going to try this out
 
dpoverlord said:
Hey guys!

I got this drive and may get another, is it best to keep it in raid or just in AHCI mode? I never have used raid and have:
3 WD Red 3TB drived
3 Seagate 1.5GB Drives.

Also I ran As SSD and I feel like I have really read / write values. Granted I am on SATA3 not SATA6 on my 1366 setup. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Keep it in AHCI, install Intel RST to improve..... - wait, you're using the native SATA2? Doesn't it have a 3rd party SATA3 chip @least? If not, bad luck however it's still a massive improvement over mech HDDs...
 
5E7EN said:
Keep it in AHCI, install Intel RST to improve..... - wait, you're using the native SATA2? Doesn't it have a 3rd party SATA3 chip @least? If not, bad luck however it's still a massive improvement over mech HDDs...
Click to expand...

Yeah gonna get a second then raid them; Slipstreaming now.

Mainly though, everyone states the MARVELL chip on a gigabyte x58-ud5 should never be used so I am going to take their advice and keep it on the intel ports.
 
soulesschild said:
Sigh was installing my new 840 Pro SSD and I decided I wanted it oriented a different way. Pulled the power cable on it and somehow snapped a tiny piece of the plastic L-Bracket part. Ugh. I'm pretty sure it doesn't affect anything (I don't have a mobo yet, was just preplanning wiring, etc) but still peeved that it snapped off so easily.
Click to expand...

This happens a lot, both with mech and ssd drives - if you can still 'connect' the cable it should work however you may need to secure/insulate with tape etc..I have never done this but the guys at 'work' have, probably about 10 times over the past few years, a few times we were able to get them replaced with creative RMAs, the rest were kept, some taped up, some fixed by cannibalizing other 'broken' drives, depending which connector had broken..TBH, it's a real piss-off considering the premium people pay, even for 'cheaper' SSDs.,,Good luck, hope it's ok..:(:):)
 
dpoverlord said:
Yeah gonna get a second then raid them; Slipstreaming now.

Mainly though, everyone states the MARVELL chip on a gigabyte x58-ud5 should never be used so I am going to take their advice and keep it on the intel ports.
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Hehe, yes, I did originally suggest you use that chip, that was what I edited:eek::) Yep, RAIDing(is that even a word?) 2 of these will give you nice t/put - and lots of Gigs, depending which RAID you use - about those Marvel SATA3 chips - A good buddy of mine has a RE3/950 combo he can't let go of, a few weeks ago I gave him a 500G 840 as a pressy - he services my car when it needs it - anyway, he uses it on the 3rd party chip, Marvel 9128 from memory and although it's no native Intel SATA 3, seems to get about 75% of it's performance..

PS - Am currently using a 512Gb PRO model, benchmarks are right on the money, had to re-install RST to get the IOPs up to speed though....plus...had to do a lot of mods on the A7M266 to get SATA 3 to work::p:p:p
 
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Hey guys!

So I went and did Raid 0 and modded the x58-ud5 rev 2 then installed intel RST drivers. Any idea if my scores are good? I am utilizing the Intel ports not the marvel.

Also I ran As SSD and I feel like I have really read / write values. Granted I am on SATA3 not SATA6 on my 1366 setup. Thoughts?
Left is non Raid and right is Raid 0
rRxIHly.png
 
dpoverlord said:
Hey guys!

So I went and did Raid 0 and modded the x58-ud5 rev 2 then installed intel RST drivers. Any idea if my scores are good? I am utilizing the Intel ports not the marvel.

Also I ran As SSD and I feel like I have really read / write values. Granted I am on SATA3 not SATA6 on my 1366 setup. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Here's a link to some Samsung AS SSD total scores (single drives);

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/chart...verall-Total-Score,Marque_fbrandx67,2792.html

Single drive on SATA III controller is outperforming your RAID setup on SATA II controller. Time to upgrade that motherboard. Get a new Haswell rig.
 
dpoverlord said:
Hey guys!

So I went and did Raid 0 and modded the x58-ud5 rev 2 then installed intel RST drivers. Any idea if my scores are good? I am utilizing the Intel ports not the marvel.

Also I ran As SSD and I feel like I have really read / write values. Granted I am on SATA3 not SATA6 on my 1366 setup. Thoughts?
Left is non Raid and right is Raid 0
rRxIHly.png
Click to expand...

To me, you results are quite good, considering you are behind the 8 ball to start with - your seq R/W scaling seems good, the rest I'm not to familiar with what latency etc penalties are relevant, though you can see it's a mix of excellent to just ok in a few of the read tests - overall, I'd be happy, when you upgrade you have some awesome weaponry, ready to pound those benchies!!! Can you tell me if it feels any faster than the single drive?
 
dpoverlord said:
Hey guys!

So I went and did Raid 0 and modded the x58-ud5 rev 2 then installed intel RST drivers. Any idea if my scores are good? I am utilizing the Intel ports not the marvel.

Also I ran As SSD and I feel like I have really read / write values. Granted I am on SATA3 not SATA6 on my 1366 setup. Thoughts?
Left is non Raid and right is Raid 0
rRxIHly.png
Click to expand...
Use the SATA 3 (6Gbps) ports, you might be able to get about the performance of the raid from 1 drive.
I'm not sure about if you can do raid on the marvell controller, though.
 
Im up to 156 days and 4.13 tb has been written to the drive. Something is writing to the drive constantly. Where can i find it out?
 
dj christian said:
Im up to 156 days and 4.13 tb has been written to the drive. Something is writing to the drive constantly. Where can i find it out?
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task manager has a selectable field for disk I/O write under the processes tab, or you can use process explorer, or compmgmt.msc and go to performance and monitor from there.
 
jdk said:
task manager has a selectable field for disk I/O write under the processes tab, or you can use process explorer, or compmgmt.msc and go to performance and monitor from there.
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Thanks! I use Process Explorer all the time. Problem is that if i close the program (eg Firefox) it will loose that data (written bytes).
 
Hmm, I'm not sure what you could use to see historical data written on a per application level. Maybe you could configure compmgmt.msc to do it.
 
JPW said:
Still the #1 SSD almost a full year later. Pretty awesome.
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Yes it is. And yet, I was hoping something faster would have come out by now. I'd love to see some improvement in 4k random reads as this isn't bottlenecked by the SATA-III interface.

I guess the vendors are in "milk-it" mode instead of improvement mode.
 
dpoverlord said:
if we have 2 of these is it better to raid 0 or keep them seperate?
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TBH I noticed no real world difference between using the drives as singular or as RAID0. The benchmarks in Magician showed double the "performance" but application loading times and encoding video/working with large RAW images were the same as a single drive. Boot time from POST to Windows login screen was 6 seconds on both configurations.

I decided on keeping the drives separate in the end (as RAID0 was my original intention) and using the second SSD as the "working" drive where current projects are held (this drive is backed up every night so if one fails I can still boot to the OS or know my data is in place rather than if one fails in the RAID configuration, losing everything for the sake of no real world performance difference).

The SATA controller on the motherboard is running in UDMA5 mode instead of UDMA6 as well because the RAID0 platter based drives are also on the same controller rather than using the ASMEDIA ones, so AHCI is not enabled (because of the RAID settings).

I am not the biggest fan of Samsung products, but must admit the 840 Pro SSD's have impressed me (& with the 120GB version now under £100 for the desktop kit, I may add a couple more to the systems very soon).
 
I am really tempted to buy this right now? is it worth to get the 512's or should I just stick with the 250's?
 
Just had a second one of these fail on me since June. I don't know if its just bad luck or what. Smart error this morning :(
 
Anybody running RAPID on their Pro(s) yet?

Thinkin' about enabling on a few of mine. Hopefully have better luck than PrimoCache (which hosed one of my boxes.)
 
Brahmzy said:
Hopefully have better luck than PrimoCache (which hosed one of my boxes.)
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Hmm. I have been using that for months on multiple machines no problems at all. Although I do not use this on the OS drive because of the potential danger caused by delaying writes (for me I set the delay to 2 minutes).
 
drescherjm said:
Hmm. I have been using that for months on multiple machines no problems at all. Although I do not use this on the OS drive because of the potential danger caused by delaying writes (for me I set the delay to 2 minutes).
Click to expand...

I was using it on my OS drive. :)
 
Brahmzy said:
Anybody running RAPID on their Pro(s) yet?

Thinkin' about enabling on a few of mine. Hopefully have better luck than PrimoCache (which hosed one of my boxes.)
Click to expand...

Do you mind explaining how it hosed your box? I have had Fancy/Primo running on several volumes for over a year, but not all on deferred writes (especially not on OS volume).

Just general data corruption from a bad crash or shutdown, with deferred write?
 
I just put one of these in my Dell Vostro 3360 and it is working very well. Windows 8.1 Enterprise. Samsung Magician is pretty neat.

The only thing I had to do was remove the 32 GB mSATA chip from the Vostro in order to make it work. Not sure how that thing is supposed to be configured, also don't care about the 32 GB lost. :D

 
Replaced 2 x Kingston 64gb Raid 0 with a single New 840 pro 128 last week, major speed difference, wow
 
Brahmzy said:
Anybody running RAPID on their Pro(s) yet?

Thinkin' about enabling on a few of mine. Hopefully have better luck than PrimoCache (which hosed one of my boxes.)
Click to expand...

Running RAPID on my PRO and EVO on separate boxes.

Then again, these got UPSs so there's a close to 0 chance of data loss due to power outage.
 
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