840 EVO

If nothing else, the odyssey of Samsung’s 840 EVO has not been lacking in excitement. After initially launching in 2013 to great fanfare as an excellent, strong-performing low-cost drive, over the long run performance regressions began to occur in deployed drives that saw the read performance of old data significantly drop. At the heart of the issue was the drive’s relatively uncommon 19nm TLC NAND, which given the combination of small feature size and tighter requirements of TLC, eventually resulted in the drive having to slow down and re-read cells to properly read the charge-decayed cells. Aiming to fix the issue, in 2014 Samsung released a performance restoration tool and firmware update for the 840 EVO. The combination of the tool and firmware would update...