Pick your jaw up off the floor

Excuse us a moment as we wipe the dribble from our chin and compose ourselves. You see, we just received word that Samsung lowered the gauntlet by launching a massive 1TB solid state drive that performs in between its 840 Series and 840 Pro Series. The new Samsung 840 EVO is a potential game changer, depending on how the drive maker decides to price its latest SSD, which we hope to know soon.

In the meantime, we can share other details, such as the fact that the new 840 EVO makes use of the industry's most compact 10-nanometer class 128Gb (gigabit) NAND flash memory available, which Samsung began mass producing back in April. The 840 EVO combines these chips with Samsung's proprietary multi-core MEX controller, resulting in a rated 520MB/s sequential write speed -- more than twice as fast as the previous generation -- and up to 540MB/s reads, along with random read and write performance of 98,000 IOPS.

"After accelerating the growth of the SSD market with last year’s launch of entry-level, high-performance SSDs, we are introducing much faster SSDs with up to 1TB capacities offering consumers a wider range of choices," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung continues to enhance its SSD brand image by delivering the industry’s highest quality solutions and continuously increasing its SSD market share by expanding the adoption of higher density SSDs especially in client PC segments."

Don't need 1TB? No need to fret, Samsung is also offering the 840 EVO Series in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 750GB flavors. We'll provide a pricing update as soon Samsung gives us the skinny.