 Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you'll like. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my long overdue unboxing of one of the most important SSDs on the market. This is the 840 Evo. It is not the fastest SSD, it's not the cheapest SSD, but what it is is the complete package. It's available in pretty much any capacity, 12250, 500, 750, and 1TB. They're all reasonably aggressively priced and because of some unique features that Samsung's implemented, extremely competitive performance-wise in spite of the very middling hardware specs. So that's a bold claim Linus, why would you say that? And the answer will come later on in the video after you sit and listen to me talk about other stuff. So first up hardware specs. They have shrunk the manufacturing process down to we think 19 nanometer, but they're calling it 1X class nanometers, which means that prices have come down versus the last generation product. They are still using TLC NAND flash, so that is 3-bit per cell MLC flash, making the data densities higher than what other guys who are using 2-bit per cell MLC, even in their entry-level drives, are using. But because Samsung has made some changes to their already excellent MDX controller, so it's now the MEX 3-core controller, they are able to achieve great performance in spite of the inherently much lower write speeds that TLC flash has to work with. So it's also got SATA 3.1 over SATA 3 on the last generation product and they've added hardware AES 256 encryption. So that's basically, there's see there's a code on the back of this drive. So that's basically a way to make it so someone's completely locked out of your drive, unless they're willing to completely erase it so you can secure your data even from theft in the event that someone actually gets your drive and they can't even put it in anywhere else and unlock it. So endurance is of course the big thing people talk about with TLC flash, because not only does it write slower, it also doesn't write as many times. Every SSD will die. It actually has a rated number of writes that will eventually kill it. Now most SSDs will actually last much longer than that rated write speed and you can see they've done some extreme testing over on Extreme Systems. Go figure, they do extreme testing there. I just don't think it's that important, even if it didn't last any longer than the rated number of write cycles. You look at an excellent comparison by a Nontech, so that'll be linked in the video description. Huge Nontech fanboy over here, if you guys didn't already know that. They estimate that even with a very aggressive workload, these drives which are the consumer grade drives are going to be lasting for years depending on the capacity. Now the larger the capacity of the drive, the longer it's going to last to the point where you're looking at drives that are probably going to last for decades or die for some other reason rather than die from being written to too many times. And it should also be noted that SSDs are much less likely to be damaged by shock or any other kind of physical, you know, demise that hard drives can meet because they don't have any moving parts. Now let's get into that bold claim that I made about why this drive, which has TLC flash, you know, a faster clocked three core controller, 400 megahertz versus 300 megahertz, and, you know, otherwise isn't that special, is the drive to beat. And three things, TurboWrite, Rapid, and their new Data Migration 2 software. So what TurboWrite is, is a way of taking part of the storage on the drive, and it varies according to the capacity of your particular drive, it goes up as you have more capacity, and takes part of that TLC flash and runs it in SLC mode. So if you're not familiar with SLC, that means only one bit per cell, all right? So that's even potentially faster than MLC, back when that was the performance and long endurance one, and MLC was the redheaded stepchild, whereas now it's high performance MLC, and then TLC as the one that is, you know, perceived as less reliable and slower. So what that means is that when the drive gets written to, it fills up that SLC behaving cache first, then distributes that data to the rest of the drive at its leisure. That means that in real world terms, the drive is faster, unless you're doing a very long sustained write to it. Now, reads are still fine on TLC flash, so TurboWrite has pretty much no drawback in a day-to-day usage scenario, which is very, very cool. You can enable it using Samsung's SSD Magician software. It's very fast, very low latency, but it does rely again on non-continuous use. So again, I'm an on-tech fanboy, guys, and you can check out their excellent article on TurboWrite, which is linked in the video description as well. Next up is RAPID, which stands for FAST. No, actually, it stands for Real-Time Accelerated Processing of IO Data. And what RAPID does is it allows you to take a gig of your DRAM, so that is your system memory, and use that to cache the SSD. Now, this one I'm not quite sure if I feel as, you know, completely positive about, as I do about TurboWrite, because it caches not only reads, but also writes, which means that if your system does lose power in the middle of it caching something into memory, this is not the same as caching to SLC flash, which is still going to be there when the system reboots and the power goes down, memory is cleared when the power goes out. So it can cause data corruption, but if you're running on a laptop or anything else that has a battery backup, such as a desktop with a UPS, and your system's very stable, I wouldn't worry about it too, too much. So what it does is it takes up to a gig of your system memory, and allows it to operate many times faster than even the fastest SSD can, because it is effectively reading and writing out of RAM. It's not the same as a RAM disk implementation, because it's all completely, it's all completely automated, unlike RAM disk software, which often requires a lot of manual intervention. The next one up is Data Migration 2. So what that allows you to do is say, okay, well, I bought this new SSD, but I could only afford a 250 gig SSD, and quite frankly, the hard drive that I bought like four years ago is already 500 gigs, and I've got all this data on it, what am I supposed to do? If I migrate it over, what, are all my videos and photos and songs just lost in the ether? The answer is no. What Data Migration 2 does is it allows you to specify two targets. So you can clone your OS and all the important programs and stuff over to an SSD, and then you can have a secondary hard drive that all your data goes to. So it's actually painless enough to use that even my mother can do it. So we're going to do a follow-up video on Rapid, the Data Migration 2 software, as well as TurboWrite that's going to be hosted by Slick. But basically, without even watching that, all you need to know is this drive just pretty much rocks. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Samsung 840 Evo. Don't forget to like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you have something to say to me. How much did Samsung pay you to make this video? Believe it or not, sometimes I just like stuff, and I'm allowed to do that. And as always guys, don't forget to subscribe.