Samsung SM843 Enterprise SSD Review (240GB) – Great Read Performance With a Great Price

INSIDE THE SAMSUNG SM843 ENTERPRISE SSD

Possibly the most difficult part of working with the SM843, which it inherited from the 840 Pro, are the case screws.  The 5-point, security Torx screws let you know immediately that disassembling your drive will void the warranty.  Luckily we like to void warranties and had just the right screwdriver to do so.

Samsung SM843 - Screwdriver

The top of the PCB shows all the major components.  The heart of the drive is the Samsung MDX controller (S4LN021X01-8030).  While the silicon is identical to the 840 Pro, the SM843 has special firmware that is focused on enterprise workloads. As a refresher, the MDX is an 8-channel controller with three ARM Cortex-R4 cores, each  running at 300MHz.

Samsung SM843 - Top Controller

Above the MDX controller is 512MB of DRAM (K4P4G324EB-FGC2) which is, unsurprisingly, supplied by Samsung.

Samsung SM843 - Top NAND

The SM843 is comprised of 21nm, 64Gb MLC NAND.  Each of the 8 packages holds 32GB, for a total of 256GB.  This means there is slightly less than 7% over-provisioning.

When we flip the PCB over we find…..well, not much of anything.

Samsung SM843 - Back

Finally, if you read a lot of enterprise reviews, you may notice something is missing from the SM843.  If you guessed large capacitors, you would be right.  Unlike many enterprise drives, the SM843 does not provide data protection in the case of power loss.  This may be a deal-breakers from many customers, but if you are using the drive as a read caching device, the exclusion may not be noticeable.

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