Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA Review

Another interesting feature of the Samsung SSD 840 EVO series is dubbed RAPID. RAPID is an acronym for Real-Time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data. It is a feature of Samsung’s Magician software (v4.2 or newer) that can speed up the drive significantly. The feature can be enabled with a single-click (followed by a reboot), in the Samsung Magician utility.

Samsung Magician Utility

Samsung acquired NVELO a while back, which was a company known for its SSD caching technology. NVELO’s software was used to accelerate hard drive transfers by buffering the most commonly accessed bits of data from the hard drive onto a faster SSD. Well, RAPID works in a similar manner, but in the case of the Samsung's 840 EVO series of drives, RAPID caches the most commonly accessed bits of data on the SSD into faster system memory.

ATTO Transfer Test with RAPID Mode Enabled

The size of the cache will dynamically adjust based on available system resources, and it follows the cache flush commands of the OS, so the risk of losing data due to an unexpected power outage isn’t much higher than a typical system using write buffering. The algorithms for RAPID are specifically tuned for solid state transfers, however, and are far more effective than any current-gen OS cache. The performance benefits of RAPID will vary depending on the age and frequency of the data being accessed, but when RAPID is being used, effective transfer speeds can hover in the 4GB's+ range. Yes, that's a G, as in gigabytes.