Conclusion

If you're in the market for an SSD that's both fast and spacious, the Samsung 840 EVO more than fits the bill.

Consumers in the market for a high-capacity, mainstream SSD should primarily be weighing up two options; the Crucial M500 or the Samsung 840 EVO.

Armed with 128Gb die, Crucial's offering is available in a spacious 960GB capacity, while Samsung's opposition comes in both 750GB and 1TB flavours.

Both solutions are ideal for a single system disk that's able to store the majority of your games and multimedia, but choosing between the two brands isn't quite as clear-cut as the benchmarks make it out to be.

With a triple-core processor and a TurboWrite cache, Samsung's 840 EVO has the upper hand as far as performance is concerned - and that's without taking RAPID Mode shenanigans into account. But on the other side of the fence, the 960GB M500 is more-keenly priced on a per-GB basis, and Crucial includes compatibility with Windows 8's Encrypted Hard Drive standard - something that Samsung is only promising in a future firmware update. And perhaps more importantly, Crucial's drive is readily available right now, while the 840 EVO remains on back order at most UK retailers.

The pendulum swings both ways, but isn't it just nice to have a choice of high-capacity SSDs priced at or around 50p-per-GB? If you're in the market for an SSD that's both fast and spacious, the Samsung 840 EVO more than fits the bill.

The Good

Strong all-round performance
Spacious 750GB capacity
TurboWrite acceleration

The Bad

Pricier than the Crucial M500 on a per-GB basis

HEXUS Awards

Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB)

HEXUS Where2Buy

The 750GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO is available to order from Scan Computers*.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

*UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum.

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Want! Quite simple…

Looking like Samsung is going to wipe the floor in the SSD world. Would be great to see RAID performance and durability :)

There's the small matter of cost to consider, too. Sure, the 120GB drive looks a tempting sub-£100 upgrade, but on a cost-per-GB basis, perceived value increases as you go up in capacity; it's 72p-per-GB for the 120GB drive, compared to 55p-per-GB for the 750GB model. That's a sizeable gap, and if you've got the funds, it's worth remembering that you'll get more gigabytes for your pounds if you opt for a larger drive.

On the other hand, it is worth considering how long it will take to fill the drives (unless you are moving archives/media/data to SSD too). I am a bit of a hoarder, I don't uninstall games when I am done with them right away, so my system drive in my laptop is quite messy. Yet even so, I am only using 332GB so far after over 2 years of use. It probably wouldn't be difficult to remove/move several dozen GBs if I really felt like it. If I was to buy a 1TB drive, I'd save 7p/GB over a 500GB drive, but if it ends up taking me 5 years to fill it up, it may be cheaper to get a smaller drive now then upgrade later.

Of course, the point is moot if someone is thinking of moving everything to SSD, but for me, 50p per GB is still not cheap enough for throwing all my data/backup etc. into such drives.

But yes, I can see myself finally moving to SSD next year.

Without a doubt these are very good drives, I have a Samsung 256Gig 830 drive for the boot end and that does fine. When the prices fall to around the same as disc drives I will certainly buy them, but at the moment what I have and the 6Tb of standard HDD's will do just fine.

I use smaller SSD's (120gb) for boot drives but HDD for storage of films/music/games not being played etc.
Don't see much point spending hundreds on a large capacity drive when it only takes a few minutes while I make a brew to transfer.

Doing film editing etc where you need all your data quickly is understandable but for most I don't see the need.

Don't mind too much as the price is continually coming down, just be nicer if the cost per gig of the larger drives was near that of the smaller drives.