Samsung 840 Pro Series 512GB SSD Review

Inside the 840 Pro

Four Pentalobe screws removed and we were in. The investment into these special tools is paying off!

No thermal pads or further screws hold the PCB in place. Samsung is still the only manufacturer that we are aware of that manufactures 100% of all components in their drives and as you’ll see below, all major parts clearly carry the Samsung moniker although the PCB seems to lack a logo.

The rear of the PCB is nothing but tracers.

The flip side contains all components and even then it’s not packed on with some extra green space present.

The MLC NAND (K9PHGY8U7A-CCK0) is Samsung 21nm Toggle DDR 2.0 in design with each module being 64GB in density to fill out the 512GB on the total drive capacity.

The LPDDR2-1066 SDRAM cache is 512MB in capacity and again, like all components on the 840, is Samsung in manufacture.

The 3-core, eight channel ARM Cortex R4 based MDX controller (300MHz) is at the heart of both the 840 and 840 Pro drives and has turned out to be quite a gem. Multitasking is handled with the three cores which helps provide more consistent performance with heavy multi-operational loads. It uses its own algorithms for wear-leveling, handles error-correction, and leverages TRIM and garbage collection – all to keep performance even over time. It also offers a hardware AES-256 encryption engine which users should handle with care as a lost password leads to an unusable drive.