Model: Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 128GB Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics
Provided By: Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics has been a leader in the electronics industry for more than 30 years. Since the introduction of their first television in 1970, this Korean company has grown to become one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, offering everything from tiny semiconductors to large home appliances. Samsung is no stranger to the storage industry either. Along with an assortment of DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives, the company offers both hard drive and flash based storage solutions for the portable and desktop computer markets
Like many other manufacturers, Samsung has set its sights on the growing solid-state drive (SSD) market. In the fall of 2012, the company introduced 840 Series SSDs. Designed and built completely in-house, the SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro were powered by Samsung's own triple-core MDX controller and featured a SATA 6GB/s interface, specially-engineered wear-leveling and garbage collection algorithms and up to 512MB of cache. The main difference between the two was that the SSD 840 used Samsung's new 3-bit/cell MLC NAND, which is often referred to as TLC NAND. This high-density NAND was more affordable than the 2-bit/cell MLC NAND found in the SSD 840 Pro, but there was a bit of a trade off in regards to endurance (program/erase cycles) and performance.
While the SSD 840 has been replaced by the SSD 840 EVO, the SSD 840 Pro continues to be one of, if not the, best consumer-grade SSDs on the market today. With its superior performance and reliability, it's hard to imagine that Samsung made the SSD 840 Pro any better, but with the latest version of their Magician software, the company has done just that. Along with a number of other improvements, Magician 4.3 gives SSD 840 Pro owners the ability to use Samsung's RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) technology. When enabled, RAPID mode is able to analyze system traffic and, using spare system resources (DRAM and CPU), improve random write performance, access to frequently-used data and overall system responsiveness.
If you've read our review of the SSD 840 EVO, you already know that RAPID is more than a marketing gimmick. With it enabled, we were able to push the drive's performance beyond what a single, SATA SSD is normally capable of. In this article, we're going to take a look at the latest version of the Samsung's Magician software and then see how well their RAPID technology works with the SSD 840 Pro. Can RAPID make an already fast drive even faster? Keep reading to find out.
