Samsung 830 256GB SSD Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 7/31/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

The Samsung 830 is the one of the only completely proprietary SSD’s on the market. Samsung manufactures their own in house controller and of course their own NAND. The 830 contains Samsung’s own 3 Core MCX Controller (S4LJ204X01) and Samsung’s own 20nm Toggle Mode NAND. So far we’ve only seen Samsung’ 3 Core MCX controller in the 830 and it appears it will remain that way. The 830 has been on the market for quite a while now, but with samples being scarce we have just now received our review drive.

 

We’re sure you have already seen more than one review of the Samsung 830 so it’s not like this is going to be some kind of ground breaking review or anything like that, it’s just going to be reviewed more in depth here. The Samsung 830 has become known across the land as a very reliable high performance drive and is not surprisingly one of the top selling SSD’s on the market today. Because of 830’s reputation for reliability and speed, the 830 is still one of the more expensive drives on the market today. The Samsung 830 desktop upgrade kit we are looking at today is available from Amazon for $250 bucks and comes with an adapter bracket, cloning software, power adapter and SATA cable. While the desktop upgrade kit has some value to it, is the 830 worth more of your hard earned money? We will see if the performance warrants it or not. Let’s start off by taking a quick look at what Samsung themselves have to say about the 830:

 

Outstanding Performance in Multi-Tasking: Samsung’s fast random read speeds (up to 80,000 IOPS) maximize performance when it matters most. A Samsung SSD is the ideal solution for your everyday computing needs, such as web browsing, document creation, viewing or editing multimedia files, playing PC games, etc.

 

Lighting Fast Speed. At Your Command: The 830 Series’ 520MB/s sequential read speed provides lightning fast access to your files, loading large multimedia files quickly and smoothly.

 

Sustained Performance and Unrivaled Reliability: Samsung SSDs are designed and built completely in-house. The Samsung SSD 830 Series is optimized for exceptional, sustained performance and unrivaled reliability through it’s specially- engineered wear-leveling and garbage collection algorithms.

 

A Complete, User-Friendly Solution: The Samsung SSD 830 series is available with a user-friendly installation kit, including a full version of Norton Ghost, an interactive installation guide, and premium installation tools for both desktops and laptops.

 

Toggle DDR NAND Flash: Toggle DDR NAND Flash Use the wider image option when adding this feature. We would like to capture all of the data represented on this specific feature image. However, do not use this feature image in this document, use the actual image in images folder. Samsung’s 20-nanometer-class toggle DDR NAND Flash chips enable data transfer rates of up to 133 megabits per second (Mbps)-more than three times faster than conventional (40 Mbps) single-date-rate (SDR) NAND Flash chips.

 

3-core ARM9-based MCX Controller: 3-core ARM9-based MCX Controller While most SSD makers rely on generic, dual-core controllers, Samsung has developed its own proprietary, triple-core MCX controllers that excel in multi-tasking and help to assure stead performance over time. Based on an ARM9 controller, its three CPU cores can execute multiple instructions such reading data, writing data and optimization.

 

256MB DDR2 DRAM Cache Memory: 256MB of DRAM cache memory helps maintain stable random read performance, even if the access range is increased.

 

Sounds good to us, now let’s get into our performance dissection of the 830 and see if it lives up to Samsung’s claims.