Samsung 840 Series 250GB SSD Review

Real World & IOPS Tests

File Copy Times Via Teracopy:

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of JPG’s of variable size and compression levels with a few movie (.MOV) files thrown in for good measure since most cameras now take video as well as stills. The second is a collection of MP3 files of various sizes which totals 5GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

Install Results: Not a big surprise here given that the write speeds are limited for this drive but surely helped along by the triple core controller. Given faster NAND like on the Pro model, these scores would definitely see a large improvement.

Windows Boot Times Via BootRacer:

Windows start up/shutdown time is always something people are interested in and we haven’t done it in a while because there was little variation with the majority of the SSDs. We recently began using an application called BootRacer to objectively measure the startup times of the drives. All of the instances of Windows were identical and freshly installed with only the video driver installed.

Test Results: The boot times falls just below the median here but by no means slow. As compared to the 10,000RPM VelociRaptor, it flies.

Samsung Magician Performance Benchmark IOPS

Samsung’s Magician toolbox also has some built in benchmark capabilities so we took the opportunity to run some tests with it. One test sows the IOPS performance of the drive.

Test Results: The IOPS performance is nearly dead on what the specifications read for the drive with random reads hitting almost 94,000 and random writes hitting just over 61,000. This is a substantial improvement over the 830 Series on both reads and writes.

We’ll wrap this with a look at the total drive capacity and our final thoughts.