Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE120BW

Just like every other review for this SSD, and any other name brand SSD, the increase in speeds in fantastic. From Windows Experience Score 6.4 to 7.9 (max) in December 2013. Incredible shutdown speed, and restart speed. You might miss the login/logo screen, its that fast. Today's SSD's are reliable, and will outlast normal hard drives. Today's SSD's have been put through equivalent stress tests of over 20 gig a day for 20+ years and they have not worn out. Their failure is more likely a result of a mechanical problem, of which a normal hard disk drives are far more susceptible to. To be honest, the difference in speed between this SSD, and other competitors is something that would be difficult for a human to discern. What is the practical 50 mb/s difference in speed, when you are comparing against other 400-500 mb/s ssd's? Maybe half a second on start-up? What makes this SSD from Samsung a great buy, is the included software, whether or not you have the desktop kit, that is included. You get migration software, and a SD set-up and monitoring software. This software exceeds the software provided by Intel for their SSD, and other manufacturers sometimes does not include any software, or provides for download a limited use software. If you are building a system, check out computer cases with built in 2.5 drive bays, and cases with built-in SSD mounts like Antec Three Hundred Two Gaming Case, Black . This case has two mounting platforms just for SSD's, one behind the motherboard, and the other on the floor of the case (SSDs will not require cooling). This setup does not use any of the bays. I purchased this case, and like it, but have not reviewed it yet. The Samsung Magician Software provides a user interface for the following tasks, which as as simple as clicking through. This software makes the Samsung SSD the best buy, when compared to similarly priced SSD's, or even similar capacity SSD's. PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKING. Benchmark the SSD, and keep a history of benchmarks. Compare them in graphs. Not just this SSD, but any of the drives in your system. PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION. Optimize Performance if your current OS does not use TRIM FIRMWARE UPDATES OS OPTIMIZATION. Optimize Windows. Easily choose three profiles; Maximum Performance, Maximum Capacity, or Maximum Reliability, and the Samsung Magician software will automatically make the associated settings on the SSD and in Windows. You can also make your own customized profile. OVER PROVISIONING. SSD need over-provisioning to maintain performance and reliability. Some SSD's like Kingston will not need Over Provisioning, but will require that you have unused space for the benefits of Over Provisioning. The Samsung Magician Software give you a recommended amount, and will unallocate the space for you. SECURE ERASE, if you ever needed to secure erase the SSD. I'll be honest, I don't use it, but I believe that SSD's have a difference procedure than disc drives. RAPID MODE. Samsung has a mode that can accelerate the SSD even more. But I have read that this acceleration can only be used in certain circumstances. It will require a gig of space to be enabled DATA SECURITY: Data security can be enabled. This is an endurance test of Samsung 840 SSDs. And, it is a conservative test. [...]

My HP Pavilion G7 laptop was a $299 purchase 2.5 years ago and has always been slow. I am using it more now and really got tired of waiting for 3 minutes for it to boot up and how annoyingly slow it was in overall functions. Now with the Samsung I am going from cold boot to full operation with chrome connected to internet in about 15-17 seconds! All my programs are running better, page loads are better....I really could not be happier. I almost bought a new laptop, so glad I did not. Warning!!! I see lots of people who are having problems cloning their drives or just cant get it to work. My advice is to slow down. When i first cloned the original HDD, i did not see that I missed cloning two drive partitions. You have to do this. I cloned the main drive, but not the partition with Windows on it or the HP stuff that is proprietary. I erased the drive then cloned again, this time highlighting the two small partitions....this time it worked like a charm. My only negative with this product is the directions that come with the drive....very lacking, but if you take your time, this is very easy. You also save big money doing this yourself instead of the geek squad doing it. UPDATE: I have purchased 2 more of these drives. The second time things did not go so well. I was trying to upgrade a Gateway ZX6900 All In One computer. Every time i tried, the cloning would work but when booting up the screen said "operating system not found". Finally i gave up in disgust and tried to install it in a Lenovo Ideacentre Q150 NetTop home theatre pc. Once again IT WORKED great! No problems with the Lenovo. I then realized that something in the partitions was causing a problem. So two weeks later I went to Best Buy to pick another one up since I wanted to do it on a weekend. I ended up getting the 840 Pro since they were all out of the Evo models. These units are very similar. The evo is slightly faster but the Pro uses a different spec that makes it probably last longer. No biggie. Anyway, i tried it all again with the cloning and once again it did not work. So, I decided to boot from a factory default gateway disc i had made...clean slate right? Wrong. Everything would start fine when booting from DVD then it would get to where it starts loading the images from the disc and it would say "disc does not have enough space"! To make a long story short, I took the drive and hooked it up by usb to my other computer and used disk management to remove a tiny 100mb partition. That did it. I put it back in and now with the Gateway ZX6900 it is all installed fine. Works great. If you are having these problems, you may just need to wipe out that tiny partition. If you go to Tom's Hardware website there are tons of answers about these Samsung drives!

I recently ordered this SSD for my Gateway desktop PC. In this review I’ll give you my opinion of the drive. The 840 series are 2.5 inch drives so I had to use a 3.5″ drive adapter bracket (the one recommended on the product page) since the Gateway only has 3.5″ drive bays. The SSD fit into the computer’s drive cage perfectly with the adapter, and after connecting the power and SATA cables I was all set to begin the software installation. First, I set the SSD to work in AHCI mode and the DVD drive as the primary boot drive in the BIOS, then booted the computer from the Gateway Recovery DVD’s that I had on hand. Since I had been planning to do a clean re-installation of Windows 7 on this PC anyway, I temporarily left the hard drive unplugged and followed the prompts to install Windows 7 on the SSD. Everything went as planned with nary a hitch. In no time at all I had Windows booting directly from the SSD. After installing a ton of Windows Updates and some of my most-used programs to the SSD, I reconnected the hard drive as a secondary data drive. I really like this setup because it gives me super fast boot-up and program start-up times from the SSD while providing plenty of storage space for my data files on the hard drive. The speed increase courtesy of the Samsung 840 SSD is simply amazing. This Gateway takes almost 2 minutes to boot to a usable Desktop from the hard drive, but with the SSD it boots in 33 seconds with essentially the same software configuration. Even better, while I used to be able to go grab a quick snack while PhotoShop Elements loaded, now that bloated resource hog loads in a flash! Overall, I think the Samsung 840 is both an outstanding solid state drive and a great value at well less than $100. It’s easy to install, runs as quiet as a mouse, is cool to the touch, and it puts a very capable, but older PC in the proverbial fast lane. I highly recommend this drive if you’re looking for an inexpensive way to really speed up your computer.

My wife's 13" Macbook is going on six years old now and just recently began chugging along. And by "chugging" I mean slowly morphing into an extremely expensive paperweight. Boot times were ridiculously slow, toggling between apps was an evening long event, and trying to scroll on a web page was like trying to slide fly paper down a glass wall. Needless to say, (cue unnecessarily epic voice), something must be done. I did a little bit of research and swung on over to my local neighborhood Amazon.com in search of the perfect SSD drive. And that, friends, is when I stumbled on this little (somewhat overpriced but totally worth it) gem. A quick 30 min install and we were back in business. I find it funny (and somewhat sad) that my wife's six year old macbook is now comparable in speed (for basic tasks) to my 15" Macbook Pro Retina. Funny how that works. For teardown and installation instructions I personally recommend ifixit.com (no I'm not paid by them to say this, yes, I have gotten in over my head before trying to follow their instructions, no, I do not hate them for it, yes, I blame myself - end of story. Can we stop talking about that now?) Note: If you plan on installing this in an Apple product, you'll need to reformat the drive. No biggie. Just needs to be done. Heck, you'll end up doing that no matter what drive you buy. Reformatting is simple. Once the drive is installed, but your computer using the OS X install disk that you have on hand open up disk utility and click "erase" make sure the settings are set to "OS X Extended (Journaled)" Should take about 1 minute (or as long as it used to take for the pre-SSD macbook to register a keystroke). Once reformatted, run the OS installation and you're in business! Easy as pie. So stop second guessing this purchase and just dive right in and do it. Worth every penny (even though SSDs are over priced in general right now). Pros: • Fairly affordable (prices will come down. remember when a flash drive was like $79 for 56mb? Blech) • Easy peasy to install • Made to fit any regular sized 2.5" hard drive bay • Completely renewed our computer • Lightweight. Not only will your computer be faster, it'll also drop some weight. It's like new years resolutions for machines. Cons: • Non yet. Seriously. I tried to think of one. • Got it! - The drive came with an unnecessary samsung disk in the box. The End.

I installed this in my 2004 dell desktop with a single core processor, and now it is MUCH faster. It was getting to the point where I was spending more time waiting on the computer than it did waiting on me. I did a good bit of research on the web before doing this upgrade, and several people said that it would not be a good upgrade because the old system would be such a bottleneck that the SSD wouldn't be able to perform - they are incorrect. I'm sure that the SSD can't perform to it's full potential, but the improvement in system performance is very good. I am not a gamer or into video editing or anything like that - I use this computer for mundane things like word processing, spread sheeting, and web browsing. If your work is more processor intensive then it might not be so great for you. If this had not worked I was going to have to consider getting a new computer - and I do not want a Win 8 machine - now I think I should be good for a couple more years at least. I also upgraded from 1 to 3 GB of RAM at the same time - however I ran the computer a good bit with only the ram upgrade before getting the SSD squared away, and I can tell you the most of the performance improvement is from the SSD. But, the memory up grade is so cheap and easy that it may be justified while you are opening the case anyway. A couple of caveats: The drive cloning software that comes with the drive did not work correctly for my application - perhaps because my machine is so old. I ended up downloading and using (free) EaseUS todo Backup - which allows you to easily clone the old drive AND resize the partition to take advantage of the bigger new SSD. That resulted in the need to repair the Master Boot Record using a windows repair CD (you have one right?) which is not hard or complicated to do. Nonetheless this issue along with a bad piece of memory complicated the process to the point that with the troubleshooting and head scratching - by the time it was all finished it was no longer a particularly simple or easy job. Maybe you will be more fortunate. Just keep your computer guy on speed dial if that is not you. Anyway, I am very happy with the end results.

UPDATE: Sunday, April 5, 2015. FINALLY got around to doing a computer rebuild and installed this new solid state hard drive, a fresh install of Win7Pro, and am in the process of reinstalling all of my software programs. After working through the many bugs of getting a new system up and running, this thing is SMOKIN'!!!! Wow, I mean this thing will do a complete shutdown/reboot and be back up and running in about 10 seconds.....Windows updates are screaming fast.....program installs are going super fast.....and I'm finally a happy camper. Wish I wouldn't have bothered with the Sabrent hard drive enclosure, which is now just collecting dust, but I'm wishing I would have switched to SS hard drives as soon as they came out. I'll never go back. Thank you, Samsung.....with the seemingly endless list of tech horrors I've dealt with in the last six months, it's nice to finally have a purchase that just works. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: Wednesday, July 9.....received my Sabrent USB 3.0 To 2.5-Inch SATA Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure a few days ago, and after easily installing the drive into the enclosure, the next hurdle was maneuvering the nearly microscopic screws into the sides of the enclosure (you do NOT want to drop one of these!) following the hard drive installation. I plugged it into a USB port on my PC, turned it on, and saw a brief Windows message pop up from the task bar saying something about the driver being installed. According to the manual, "At this point, the hard drive is completely installed." Evidently not. It says the new hard drive should show up in Device Manager under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers as "USB Mass Storage." I have four "USB Mass Storage" devices showing, and clicking on "Properties" on each one yields no discernable identifying information to anyone but a Microsoft programmer. The manual also says I may need to format the drive if it's new, and sends me to MY COMPUTER / MANAGE / DISK MANAGEMENT to accomplish this. At this point, I'm supposed to go the "drive information in the right column and right-click on the drive" to initialize the format. Alas, I have no drive showing in the right column. After clicking on Disk Management in the left column, a message at the bottom of the right column seems to be perpetually stuck on "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service..." That's as far as I've gotten. I guess I can install the Samsung in my PC, start from scratch with a fresh install of Windows and all my stuff, and either return the Sabrent enclosure or keep it for some future use. Will update again if and when I get the Samsung SSD up and going. :( --------------------- Sunday, July 6, 2014......just received my new Samsung SSD in the mail yesterday and was all excited about getting it up and going today, but won't be able to - I inadvertently bought the Single Unit Version that only includes the hard drive and NOT the necessary adapter cable(s). You can get the full Desktop Kit (model MZ-7TE120KW) that includes the bracket, screws, SATA cable, power cable, USB to SATA cable, and drive spacer. I ordered the Sabrent USB 3.0 To 2.5-Inch SATA Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure to hook up my new Samsung SSD, so stay tuned...

This Samsung SSD is definitely a amazing SSD. I have owned the Samsung 830 250 GB, Samsung 840 Pro 250GB and now the Samsung Evo 120GB. I like this drive the best. I have had it for a couple months now and it has worked amazingly just as knew it would. I have complete faith in Samsung drives as not a single one has let me down. i have had my Samsung 830 for along time now and it hasn't skipped a beat. I cannot even go with out an SSD in a computer anymore. I have three computers and all three of them have a Samsung SSD in them. If you even think of buying am SSD from another brand YOU ARE CRAZY!!!! The Samsung drives have been killing the competition with both quality and price. They have the least failure rates, the Samsung Evo's are half the cost, and have just as good read wright speeds as all of the other SSD's. Lets just say that even if another drive has a little bit better read/wright speeds. You will NEVER notice it. Not unless you intend to buy two ssd's put them in the same desktop and then share large amounts of data between the two of them constantly. IF that is the case, go look for more buisness oriented NAS as that is the only time you would do that. Check out Linus's video on You Tube on this drive at "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pEyUeqZupI" I quote him "this is the drive to beat". See his unboxing and him going over all the awesome extras you get with this drive. He can describe the extra features way better than i could type them out. Lets just say that this took my 10 year old computer with a core 2 duo processor, GTX 9600, 2gb of ram and an EVGA motherboard and made it as fast as my brand new $2500 computer i built less than a year ago. Turbo write is the most amazing thing that has come out since the first SSDs that were released that actually worked. There controllers were the first really stable ones ever built. They causes so little failure rates in the Samsung 830 that everyone started to migrate to Samsung SSDs. Now since the Samsung Evo cut the prices in Half per GB, they are extremely affordable. If i haven't persuaded you to buy this drive as of yet, then i never will and go ahead and waist your money on some other company, you will be back in a year or two to get this drive or a newer version of it. I promise.

SSDs are very fast storage devices. These can be used for your operating system and games, and things should load up much faster from it. The Samsung 840 EVO SSD at 128 GB has proven very useful over the last two years in its usage. If you are looking to put an operating system and some games, the 128 GB version will be good enough for you. Pros - Good price - Has management software if you are new to SSDs or need help setting it up - Has lasted two years with no issues whatsoever - Can easily handle a format if you want to reinstall an OS - Can be cloned - MUCH faster than a traditional HDD Cons - Not a lot of accessories (no disk mount or any special adapters for easy setup) - You need general knowledge on how to install it (which is no problem if you've built a PC) Even with a fresh HDD, I usually get up and do a something while waiting for my self built computer to load. Once I start filling up a traditional hard drive with content, I start seeing slowdowns on the system's start up speed. Once I had this installed, my computer booted up in seconds. Even now, with the SSD being used for two years, I have no problems loading games and software on my SSD within a second of loading onto the desktop. I recommend you to pick up this SSD for your OS and commonly used programs while getting a HDD for more storage capacity. Most people overlook the storage as the reason their computer boots and loads up slowly, and they start looking at computer processors and RAM for no reason. It'll be very hard for me to switch back to loading my OS from a traditional hard drive.

Con este disco duro se incluye un CD con utilidades para clonar el sistema operativo y programas del disco duro existente. Sin embargo, en mi caso quería aprovechar para hacer una limpieza completa, con reinstalación del sistema desde 0, y aunque no veía referencias sobre ello (casi todos los usuarios que han opinado han clonado el sistema existente) no he tenido ningún problema. La instalación la he hecho sobre un minibarebone que tenía una única bahía para disco duro y una bandeja para DVD ultraslim 12,7 mm, como los de los portátiles. Como quería conservar el disco duro previo he operado como sigue, lo que creo que vale para cualquier barebone y para cualquier portátil: 1º) (Único trabajo "de manitas") Desmontar la bandeja de DVD y montar un adaptador para disco duro de 2,5" a bahía de DVD, por ejemplo, éste: EiioX - Adaptador de disco duro universal SATA caddy para ordenador portátil, HDD/SSD para CD/DVD-ROM, 12,7 mm con el disco SSD montado en la bandeja y ésta conectada a una toma SATA de la placa base (por lo general la misma en la que estaba conectado el DVD). 2º) Desconectar la toma SATA del disco duro de origen del PC, para que no se detecte el sistema operativo en el siguiente arranque. 3º) Conectar un DVD externo con el disco de instalación de Windows (o el que toque, en mi caso fue el W7 Enterprise 64 bits) 4º) Arrancar. En este paso se inicia automáticamente la instalación del sistema y funciona como una instalación en PC nuevo, sin ninguna diferencia. Windows reconoce el disco y lo prepara para la instalación sin diferenciar si es SSD o no. La instalación se completa en unos 10 minutos sin nada destacable. Arranca Windows en aproximadamente 1/4 del tiempo que llevaba a la anterior configuración. 5º) Apagar el PC, conectar el disco duro original y arrancar manteniendo "supr" pulsado. Esto arranca la utilidad de la BIOS. Hay que buscar la opción "orden o secuencia de arranque" y seleccionar el SSD Samsung como 1ª opción. Salir guardando cambios y permitir que el sistema arranque. Proceso finalizado... A partir de ahí: - Cargar drivers del sistema que habremos descargado previamente, como en cualquier instalacion (BIOS, LAN, tarjeta gráfica, etc) - Conectar a internet e instalar un buen antivirus - Cargar las utilidades que acompañan en CD al SSD Samsung, que permitirán optimizar su funcionamiento. - Cargar programas - Borrar en el disco duro antiguo los directorios Windows y Archivos de programa (no es necesario pero libera espacio...). Queda como disco de almacenamiento, conservando todos los datos que tenía. Fácil y sin problemas

I bought this SSD after reading several reviews from internet. All hardware and firmware is manufactured by Samsung unlike other branded SSDs in which most of the parts are sourced from different vendors (in China and Taiwan) which reduces reliability. Other brands have higher failure rates and Samsung has lowest (almost NIL) and thus I selected to go with Samsung. This particular 840 EVO is faster and better than previous 840 series and also not as expensive as 840 Pro. I am using Windows XP SP2 and I had no problems in detecting the disk and using it. I am not using any additional softwares provided by Samsung like "Samsung Magician" software and RAPID software which further claims to improve the speed. The disk is fine without that. In fact I don't want to make my disk dependent on these softwares. I am having SATA 2 (not SATA 3) motherboard and the disk is fine and running with very high speed even with SATA 2 (3 Gb/s). So I doubt if SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) would provide any added advantage. The booting time of Windows XP was improved from previous 1 minute 30 seconds (with HDD) to 28 seconds (with SSD). So this is a huge improvement. Also all programs like MS-Office, Firefox etc. open under 1 second. Previous used to take 5-6 seconds to open. Random read/write speed are excellent as compared to HDD. Benchmarking tool shows 240 MB/S and 220 MB/S as Read/Write rates which is very good. I don't even have AHCI on my motherboard but still the disk is extremely fast. So purchase it even if your motherboard is 5-6 years old and just supporting SATA 2. It doesn't come with any SSD adapter for installing in desktop but it can be safely placed anywhere in cabinet with just one screw as it is very light. It doesn't get hot even after hours of usage. So overall a must have upgrade for old (or even new) computer.

Really sweet drive. Super fast, Data migration software was a breeze to use. Reboot time is almost instant with. price was right and adds some much needed bang to older rigs. Would buy another no questions asked

Samsung does not kid around when it comes to SSDs. Reformatted my PC just as this baby arrived, threw it into the case, and next thing I know this beast's making my PC boot up in 10 seconds flat. From a hindsight perspective, this is the single best decision I've made in terms of boosting performance. Agreed, 250GB's the sweet spot at the moment, but if you want a taste of what SSDs can really do, this is the best place to start. Samsung also offers its Magician software online and on a disc in the package, and helps you set up the SSD for optimum performance. Did I mention that its' RAPID software is over the top? Make sure you have at least 4 GB RAM if you do try and make use of the feature though. The rewards are worth it. If you found this information helpful, please hit "Yes" below to encourage me to write more reviews! :D

Perfect for my old pc which has sata interface that is limited to non ahci support; Asus P4P800 Vm board does not support ahci. Still happy with results of : 134 Mb/sec reading and 133 Mb/sec writing. Migrating os was easy and straight forward...