Introduction

We can't talk about the Samsung 840 Pro without putting OCZ Vector in the same sentence. 840 Pro and Vector are the two top performing enthusiast class SSDs on the market today. Their lead over drives like Plextor's M5 Pro Xtreme, Corsair's Neutron GTX and Team SandForce is large enough that we now have a new class of SSD, the Super Class. Super Class comes from the automobile industry where we have cars, sports cars and super cars. 840 Pro and Vector are the two super cars.

Before we get started with our review of the Samsung 840 Pro 512GB, let's recap the 128GB and 256GB drives and how they compared with Vector in the same capacity size. We're going to start with the 256GB capacity size since it's fairly cut and dry. The Samsung 840 Pro is faster in this capacity size. Its lead is nearly across the board, but Vector is very close everywhere except when we loaded the drives with data. The data on drive testing sealed the enthusiast crown and 840 Pro 256GB came out on top.

In the 128GB capacity size things aren't so easy to explain. We have to go all the way back to the Samsung 830 128GB review. In that review we noticed the 830 128GB's latency issue. The 128GB capacity size was the only 830 we've ever tested and it had an amazing amount of write latency, enough write latency that it caused stutter problems when we ran it in a test system with the OS installed. Under normal use it wasn't that bad, but when we multitasked, it popped up, and it was nasty compared to other 120/128GB drives on the market at the time.

Fast forward to the 840 Pro 128GB review. The write latency returned in the 128GB capacity size, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the 830 128GB. In the review world, I only know of two reviewers who've talked at Samsung's 128GB capacity size issues, Hugh Briggs at HardOCP and myself at TweakTown. Hugh tested the 840 with TLC NAND and we tested the 840 Pro. We know of other people talking about the problem, my email and Facebook Message Box has a few questions about it from end users who wanted to know why their 120/128GB Samsung drives don't live up to reviewers high praise. So, in the 128GB capacity class, Vector is the clear winner and by a massive margin.

Two down, one to go, today we look at the massive 512GB capacity size. The list of 100K IOPS drives is very small and we have most of them in the review today. The one that is missing is Plextor's new M5 Pro Xtreme 512GB. We've working on getting that drive in for a review - stay tuned because we have the other capacity sizes in house already. Still, none of the Plextor drives have ran the same pace as Vector and 840 Pro.

Let's dive right in and get started with what we have, the two fastest enthusiast SSDs on the market today - Samsung 840 Pro 512GB verses OCZ Vector 512GB.