[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
Starting off by taking a look at the packaging which the Samsung EVO 250GB comes in, the main colour of the box is black, with a blue and green sticker in the right hand corner with Samsung SSD on it. Also in the centre of the box, is an illustration of the SSD itself and along in the bottom left and top right corners, we have information regarding the brand, model number and the actual size of the SSD.
The rear has a more detailed outlook on the EVO featuring information regarding what is included in the box, as well as including a 3 year limited warranty from Samsung themselves. The package includes Samsung’s data migration and magician software for help with cloning effectively eliminating the need for Norton Ghost etc. The rear of the packaging also follows the same design and colour scheme as the front.
Upon opening the box, the Samsung EVO 250GB SSD comes encased in a black plastic try which ensures protection during transit. It also looks professional and shows Samsung have taken not only function but style into their packaging.
Bundled with the Samsung EVO 250GB SSD is the following:
1 x Installation guide
1 x Warranty statement summary
1x Software disc
2 x Samsung SSD activated stickers
Taking a look at the Samsung EVO SSD itself, the main colour Samsung have gone with is a dark metallic like grey with black font which clearly states “Samsung Solid State Drive”. Very minimalistic but I really do like it, it oozes style and is one of the nicest looking SSDs currently available. It also has 4 x mounting holes (2 on each side) to mount into a 2.5” HDD/SSD enclosure.
On the flip side, there is information regarding the drive such as the storage amount; in this case its 250GB. Also noted is the 840 EVO, the EVO drives themselves are part of the ever popular Samsung 840 SSD family and if they are as reliable as their little (840 basic) and bigger (840 Pro) brother then Samsung could have possibly created a happy medium.
The controller used in the EVO 250GB is the Samsung 3-core MEX controller which utilises Samsung NAND flash memory. This also includes 512MB of low power DDR2 SDRAM cache memory to provide even more to make this drive fly out of the stalls; well theoretically. It features a SATA 6GB/s port but is also backwards compatible with SATA 3GB/s albeit the worst case scenario is that it’ll run slower due to the slower output of SATA2.
The other main feature of the EVO drive is a new feature called RAPID mode. This can be enabled via the Samsung Magician software and what this does is literally amazing. It uses some of your free memory as a cache which works efficiently and allows you to surpass every day SSD speeds by around double. This is an impressive feat and will make for some interesting testing. Another thing to note is that there is another feature present called Turbowrite which effectively does the same thing, but increases sequential write speed.
