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Samsung bundles Assassin's Creed III with SSD 840 Pro to spark a sales revolution, ships the 840 line
Samsung's experiment with a Ghost Recon SSD bundle must have been a hit with gamers, since it's coming back for a second round the very same year. The upgrade-minded buying 128GB, 256GB or 512GB versions of the SSD 840 Pro can get a free downloadable copy of Assassin's Creed III for a "limited time" to take advantage of those 540MB/s peak read speeds while they skew the fate of the American Revolutionary War. The bundle comes not-so-coincidentally as Samsung has shipped and priced the wider SSD 840 line itself: while we knew the Pro line's impact on our wallets, the regular models are now ready to sell at prices between $140 for a 120GB drive to $700 for a 500GB model. That's a $50 to $190 savings over the Pro models, but we'll leave it to you to decide whether faster write speeds, slightly more capacity and Connor's secret fight with the Templars are worth the premium.
Samsung SSD 840 Pro caters to speed seekers with faster random access
It's difficult to thrive in the solid-state drive world. Unless you've got just the right controller and flash memory, most performance-minded PC users will rarely give you a second glance. Samsung muscled its way into that narrow view with the SSD 830 last year; it intends to lock our attention with the new SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. The Pro's 520MB/s and 450MB/s sequential read and write speeds are only modest bumps over the 830, but they don't tell the whole story of just how fast it gets. The upgraded MDX controller boosts the random read access to a nicely rounded 100,000IOPS, and random writes have more than doubled to 78,000IOPS or 90,000IOPS, depending on who you ask and what drive you use. The improved performance in either direction is a useful boost to on-the-ground performance, as both AnandTech and Storage Review will tell you. We're waiting on details of the ordinary triple level cell-based 840 model beyond its 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities, although there won't be an enormous premium for the multi-level cell 840 Pro over existing drives when it arrives in mid-October -- the flagship line should start at $100 for a basic 64GB drive, and peak at $600 for the ultimate 512GB version.
