Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series Review

I have three Macbooks Pro. All of them came with a tradditional HDD. They were performing unbearably slowly - applications switching and loading, booting, and even shutting down frequently took minutes. Scrolling in any application, for example: browsers or office applications were often very laggy. This was true even when I had large amounts of free memory. It was very frustrating, and I was almost ready to buy a new laptop.

However, I could see very high disk activity in the Activity Monitor during the slow periods and figured the bottleneck was probably my hard drive... so I went to Amazon bought the Samsung 840 Evo (#1 Best Seller). As a first step, I bought only one SSD for testing purposes before deciding to buy three. Best computer decision of my life, the performance problems evaporated when I put in the Evo. Apps launch in seconds, no laggy scrolling, and I haven't hit the limit in terms of the numbers of things I can have open at once.

The SSD does not require an adapter in these MacBooks and can be directly swapped with the original HDD. Instead of using the bundled software during installation, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone.

After installing the SSDs I did some speed tests on all my Macbooks. The reads, writes increased at incredible speeds, enhancing boot-up speed, application loading and multi-tasking performance. The following speed tests were done using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from the Mac App Store:

	13" Macbook Pro (early 2011)	13" White Macbook (late 2009)	13" White Macbook (mid 2007)
SATA III controller	6 Gbit/s max	3 Gbit/s max	1.5 Gbit/s max
Speed of original 5400 RPM HDD	~80 MB/sec (read and write)	unknown (didn't test)	~30 MB/sec (write) and ~40 MB/sec (read)
Speed of new Samsung 840 EVO	488 MB/sec (write) and 506 MB/sec (read)	204 MB/sec (write) and 268 MB/sec (read)	118 MB/sec (write) and 130 MB/sec (read)

As you can see from the speed tests, the speed of the Samsung 840 EVO is different in all three MacBooks due to the different SATA controllers. My newest Macbook Pro (early 2011) benefited the most from the new SSD. Nevertheless, the new SSD makes a huge difference in "everyday speed" in all three MacBooks and I am VERY, VERY happy with the results! I highly recommend this drive for MacBooks!

Customer reviews on Amazon
By K. Bramwell (Florida)

I installed my 250GB 840 EVO in my Macbook Pro. I replaced the Superdrive with a hardrive caddy and moved the original 500GB SATA there. My battery life has increased by about 45 min.

By Vlad the Bad (Moscow, Russia)

Speed difference between the 840 and the 840 EVO shocked me. I thought it would be "a little" faster but...WOW. The WD Black 7200 Rpm is just for reference of a standard HDD.

By Juan L. Deaza "juanldeaza"

New 250GB Samsung Evo. Rapid Mode enabled, Sata III. Gigabyte UD3 Z77. 8Gb Ram core i5 3450. Coping 20Gb file speed: 250-402Mb/s from sandisk extreme to evo.

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