Today's SSDs are a hodgepodge of different ingredients, all sourced from various companies. It's most likely that the memory inside came from one place, while the the controller came from another. All the SSD makers do is slap it all together in a small box and tinker with the controller's firmware, then get some marketing people to build an advertising campaign. Samsung isn't one of those companies.
It's one of the only manufacturers that actually make the entirety of its SSDs. Take the brand new SSD 840 PRO, for example. Both the memory and the controller are built in-house by people wearing Samsung barcode tattoos. The memory in our review sample was 512MB of Samsung's new 21 nanometre MLC NAND, but from the Windows desktop only 476GB of it was usable, with the rest reserved for garbage collection and other SSD lifespan-stretching duties. The controller used is Samsung's MDX, and it packs quite the punch thanks to the three ARM Cortex R4 processors inside.
We used Anvil's Storage Benchmark R5 to put the drive through its paces, and were blown away by the excellent performance. It led the OCZ in most areas, blitzing most other drives in the process, though writing speeds weren't quite as fast as the Vector. At just $1.12 per Gigabyte, which is extremely cheap for a top tier SSD, Samsung is onto a winner with the 840 PRO.
Samsung SSD 840 PRO 512GB.. view detail here
