If you’ve got the ‘upgrade itch’ and want to make a bit of an improvement to your rig, SSD is the way to go. These hard drives are notoriously slow to write to and only offer tiny capacity, though. Samsung aim to change this with their 840 EVO; a drive that comes with up to 1TB of storage and writes at up to 520MB/s.
The 840 EVO was announced at the 2013 Samsung SSD Global Summit in Korea this week, and branded as ‘SSDs for Everyone’. The drive will be available in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750BG, and – a world first – 1TB flavour, with even the little 120GB having a sequential read/write speed of 540/410 MB/s. That’s terrific performance, and increasing the size of the drive will bag you 520MB/s of write speed. The new speed is due to some fancy tech known as ‘TurboWrite’. For comparison, Samsung’s previous 120GB model wrote at a measley 130MB/s.
The drives launch at $109.99 for the 120GB drive, with the 1TB priced at $649.99. It’s still a pricey game then, but SSD technology is worth the cost if you can stretch to that premium. A lot of people forget about hard drives, but a good SSD will improve your system performance phenomenally. With your OS loaded onto an SSD, you’ll have boot times comparable (sometimes better) than a tablet computer or smartphone. Everything will run silky smooth, and lengthy load times become things of the past. If you can afford the larger capacity drives, playing games from SSD is an experience worth having.
No word on when these guys will be available at consumer retail, but it’s probably wise to start saving your pocket money now.
Thanks, AnandTech.