Samsung 840 EVO 500GB (1 of 1)

The Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive showed up from that ebay sale I posted a few weeks ago. The plan for this drive is to the upgrade the Samsung 830 256GB SSD that I installed a year and half ago in my Asus Zenbook ux32vd. The Zenbook still does a great job, but I want a little more space so that I can work on small and medium size projects without an external hard drive. With windows 7, adobe CC, and a few other editing tools I use on a daily bases the 256GB SSD only leaves me with about 120GB of free space for editing. That’s enough space for a few quick edits but it’s pretty easy to collect over a 100GB worth of footage in a single day shooting with two cameras. The Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive should give me around 320GB or so of swinging room so that I’m not constantly attaching a 500GB or 1TB USB drive to access clips.

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB (2 of 2)

It seems build quality has improved in the newer SSDs, the Samsung 840 EVO offers up a nice aluminum case, while older drives like OCZ Vertex (above) are housed in plastic. The strange part is the old OCZ drive uses around 2 watts when running, while the 840 EVO only uses 240 milliwatts (.24 watts). It would make more sense if the OCZ case was an aluminum heatsink, maybe that’s while the old drive is so much thicker than the new one.

Samsung 830 after 2 years s

I don’t know what the threshold is when you convert from a normal user to a “power user”, but after a year and half of use, the original Samsung 830 256GB SSD has seen 2.3TB of writes to the drive. That works out to around 4.2GB a day on average. That’s not exactly and endurance run, but i’m guessing it exceeds normal use. In that time I also haven’t run into any S.M.A.R.T. events with the drive and everything appears to be working normally. 

Samsung 830 256 GB speed test s

Read and write speeds have stayed pretty consistent on the Samsung 830 256GB SSD. The drive still hits above 520MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes. I’m not expecting a big jump in speeds with the new Samsung 840 EVO, but I went ahead and dropped it into a system for quick testing while I wait for a torx kit to show up.

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB speed test s

Looks like the Samsung 840 EVO has a slight jump in read speeds at 541MB/s and a large jump in write speeds at 536MB/s. The 100+ MB/s write speed is a nice bonus, but it looks like the drive takes a hit in the random reads. That shouldn’t be a huge issue as I wasn’t unhappy with the speed of the 256GB SSD and the 840 EVO is pretty close in speed overall.

Once I get the torx kit, i’ll post an upgrade video for the Asus Zenbook ux32vd. Even though it’s an older laptop, it still keeps up well as an NLE system.

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