Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD Review – 1TB mSATA SSD Capacity Along With TurboWrite and Great Security Features

SAMSUNG RAPID MODE TECHNOLOGY

We have covered RAPID Mode in detail previously through our coverage in Korea, our review of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB notebook SSD, as well as our recent report on its use in the 840 Pro. Samsung RAPID Mode uses your computers idle DRAM in order to speed up the transfer of data significantly.  It can be used on any single Samsung 840 SSD, regardless of whether it is a boot or data drive.  RAPID can only be used on one Samsung SSD per system and it is activated through menu selection post Samsung Magician installation. To give an idea of the significant performance increase, let’s take a look at the Samsung Benchmark before, and after, RAPID has been activated:

BEFORE

RAPID ACTIVATED

As we can see, RAPID Mode paints a completely different picture and negates any thoughts of the SATA 3 bottleneck we have gotten used to.  Let’s take a look at a few other benchmarks while RAPID Mode is active:

ATTO does a great job of reminding us that we are using DRAM for data transfer and consistent transfer speed performance is not as common as what we see in normal SATA 3 testing.

Not only do we see significantly higher read and write performance of large files, but also, low 4K random write transfer speeds are 7-8 times that of what we might normally see in our testing.

If only we could achieve such results in AS SSD with a normal SSD.  Examining these results, one might think that an obvious visible performance difference might be seen in our every day use.  Such is not the case as the upgrade seen from a hard drive to SSD is based on disk access times and, when then examining a normal SSD result to these above, disk access times don’t change to a point where typical PC use might show a ‘boost in performance.

Those that consistently transfer large volumes of data just might observe that ‘boost’, as is evident in the transfer of ISO, Program and Game files shown in the Copy Benchmark above.

Once again, ASU ‘shows off’ performance that can be achieved through use of DRAM.  This software also provides full system and SSD identification in the lower left and right panels, revealing that we actually used two of our test systems in the compilation of this report.

Last but not least, we can see moderate results with PCMark Vantage but nothing spectacular and the reasoning behind this is that each test is independent of the other, preventing the caching of ‘hot data’ through test repetition.