14 DAY TRIAL // Solid-state drives (SSDs) are usually considered faster but less capacious replacements for hard disk drives (HDDs), but the Samsung 840 EVO, which just was put up for pre-order, is different.
Well, technically it can still be used in laptops and tablets, since those things often have mainboards with mSATA ports.
Nonetheless, Samsung made the product for something different, specifically the production industry, like film making.
The drive can, say, be used in digital video cameras with sSATA SSD slots, enabling lossless filming of high-resolution videos.
Thus, while ultrabooks can very well benefit from being outfitted with a Samsung 840 EVO, shooters of 4K video will probably appreciate it more.
Anyway, the solid-state drive is the highest-capacity mSATA model in the world, with 1 TB of storage space.
It has been part of Samsung's OEM channel for a while, meaning that it has been shipping as part of notebooks, ultrabooks and other pre-configured products.
The beginning of pre-orders means that customers from the DIY market can finally buy it standalone, though the price of $615 / €454 isn't exactly accessible to all.
Those who would be tempted to argue that 1 TB is not all that much should consider that SSDs don't usually come in more than 256 – 500 GB, and those are 2.5-inch models, not tiny mSATA that are smaller than a credit card (although not as thin, obviously).
For those who want the full specifications, the 840 EVO mSATA SSD has a Samsung MEX controller, with a triple-core ARM processor, no over-provisioning and 1 GB LPDDR3 memory as buffer.
Between that and the TLC (triple-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips, the performance can reach 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write.
We're not really sure when shipments of the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA solid-state drive will begin, unfortunately.