Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup

Internals:

I must say I was caught a bit off guard when I saw the need to bust out my iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit just to crack open the 840 Pro.

Yes thats right, Samsung used pentalobular screws to clamp shut the 840 Pro. If you want to peek insde of one of these, youll need a #5 pentalobe screwdriver. This is the size used for the screws tyically used to crack open a MacBook Air.

Once inside we got to see the goodies. Here are the front and rear PCB shots:

As you can see, this is very high capacity flash chip packaging – only 8 for a 512GB SSD, making for 64GB per package. Now for a closer chip shot:

Controller: Triple core Arm Cortex MDX @ 300MHz
RAM: Samsung DDR 2, 512MB
Flash: 2x-nm class Samsung DDR2 toggle-mode NAND, running at 400 Mbps per channel.

Finally, I busted into my SSD stores and composed this family shot for your viewing pleasure:

From left: FlashSSD 32GB SLC, PB22J (OEM), 470 Series, 830 Series, 840 Series

Testing Methodology

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we'll help you out! 

Test System Setup

We're currently qualifying a new Z77 testbed along with some new (non-standard) benches, but there are a few more kinks to work out for consistent results. I'm therefore sticking with our tried and true Z68 SandyBridge unit for this piece. 

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig. 


Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i5-2500K
Motherboard Asus P8Z68-V Pro
Memory Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9
Hard Drive G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD
Sound Card N/A
Video Card Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Video Drivers Intel
Power Supply Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version DX9.0c
Operating System Windows 7 X64
  • PCMark05
  • Yapt
  • IOMeter
  • HDTach
  • HDTune
  • PCPer File Copy Test
  •  

 

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