Using the 840 EVO Series
The 840 EVO Series SSD is easy to install and use. It comes with Samsung’s SSD Magician software (see Final Thoughts for more on this).
Magician eliminates the confusion and uncertainties of SSD management, making it simple for users to maximize the performance and lifetime of their Samsung SSD. In addition to its performance optimization features, Magician (from the version 4.2) also provides 840 EVO users the option to enable RAPID mode (Real-time Accelerated Processing of Input-output Data) – an innovative performance enhancement that processes data on a system level by using free DRAM memory as a cache. Once enabled in Magician, RAPID mode provides an overall PC performance boost (see later for more details).
Data Migration (Cloning your old drive)
If you want to use the 840 EVO as your system drive you can either install a clean version of Windows, followed by all your software, or you can use the Samsung Data Migration software (if you purchased one of the kits – see later for more details).
The software is simple to use, you just install it and run it from within Windows.
Then you connect up the 840 EVO, and select the source drive (in my case it was the 840 PRO from last year) and then select the 840 EVO as the destination drive.
After accepting the various warnings about not being able to get your data back if you select the wrong destination you just sit back and wait. As you can see, I cloned a 238.5GB drive in just over 23 minutes, and it worked perfectly.
Performance Testing
Here is our usual suite of performance testing – all testing was conducted via a SATA III 6Gb connection.
The spec of the machine used to do the testing is as follows:
- Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit version
- 16GB RAM
- Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Windows 8
This gave me a Primary hard disk rating of 8.1, which is the highest I have ever had this rating.
HD Tune Pro
The average Read speed was 371.3 MB/s (the 840 PRO scored 299.8 MB/s).
The average Write speed was 348.8 MB/s (the 840 PRO scored 265.3 MB/s).
File benchmarking was as follows:
CrystalDiskMark
