On the heels of its SSD Global Summit at the Westin Chosun in Seoul, Samsung has introduced a new line of Solid State Drives (SSD) aimed at the consumer market. The new Samsung SSD 840 EVO will come in capacities of 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. The increase in storage capacity is due to the switch to an impressive 10 nanometer (nm) transistor process that allows Samsung’s engineers to increase the storage density to new heights. Right now, there are very few internal 3.5” 1TB SSD single drive products, but the ones that come to mind are the Crucial M500 ($600, on a 20nm process) and the OCZ Octane ($1500).
While Samsung has not provided any pricing at publishing time, the “consumer focus” of this product should yield a price that is well below the OCZ SSD, and we expect it to compete with Crucial. The end-game for Samsung is to convince end-users to switch to SDDs for good. It is true that no-one questions the benefits of SSD technology but the absolute amount of storage and the price remain two critical factor that prevents total SSD ubiquity. With this new line of products, the storage capacity jumps by 100% when compared to the previous SSD 840 line of product. If price isn’t a concern, laptop users should be satisfied now.
When it comes to price/GB, classic hard drives are still cheaper per GB and they are getting thinner as well, but they are not able to offer the performance and sturdiness (to shocks…) that SSD do offer. If price/GB is of importance, they remain a good choice – if you are willing to leave performance on the table.
Talking about performance, Samsung says that the SSD 840 EVO doubles the performance in sequential writes compared to the previous generation by reaching 520MB/s, and since the speed vary with the various capacities (because as capacity grows, so does data-bandwidth parallelism), the new 120GB SSD is 3X as fast, says Samsung. Keep in mind that these numbers are often theoretical and that real-world measurements may yield different results.
The pricing information is the final critical piece, and we are looking forward to seeing how Samsung’s “SSDs for everyone” moto translates into dollars.