If our lack of reviews didn't give it away, there have been few noteworthy SSD releases this year, with OCZ's in-house Vertex 450 and the Marvell 88SS9187-based SanDisk Extreme II being the primary exceptions. That's a lot less eventful than previous years and 2012 alone brought the OCZ Vector and Vertex 4, Crucial Adrenaline, Intel SSD 520 Series as well as countless other SandForce SF-2281-powered drives.

Samsung's contribution to the enthusiast flash drive market perhaps deserves special recognition, as its 840 Pro series arrived ahead of the holidays with 21nm Toggle NAND chips and crushed most of the competition. Although it's been a while and OCZ's flagships can certainly put up a fight, we still tend to favor Samsung's product -- at least partly because the 512GB 840 Pro as survived a year of duty in my office PC.