The Samsung SSD 830 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 24, 2011 1:02 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Samsung
- pm830
- Samsung SSD 830
Final Words
The Samsung SSD 830 isn't the fastest drive we've tested, but it generally produces results in the upper echelon of high-end SSDs. If Samsung is able to at least match the current pricing of the SSD 470 and continue its excellent track record in drive reliability, I can see the 830 being a fine recommendation for pretty much any desktop user. The power consumption numbers are a bit troubling but as I alluded to earlier, we are testing a ridiculously high capacity unit - it remains to be seen how smaller capacity drives fare in the power charts.
It's amazing to see Samsung come so far in the enthusiast space. From a drive that I simply wouldn't recommend to building a downright competitive solution backed by a near flawless track record. What I'm even more excited about with this drive is the fact that it will likely find its way into a number of high end OEM systems over the next year. Although I'm glad that more manufacturers are offering SSDs with their systems, I'm often disappointed by their controller selection. If the PM830 is included in the option pool for the next round of design wins however, I'll be much more comfortable recommending that users tick the vendor-supplied SSD option (*cough* Apple).
I've had the SSD 830 for less than a week and in my limited testing it does seem to do very well. I'll be hammering on it for the weeks and hopefully months to come but as I've already mentioned, Samsung's reputation for reliability rivals that of Intel. Despite the praise though I do wish Samsung would more significantly address one of its long standing issues. I honestly believe Intel has the right idea of performing as much garbage collection in real time as possible. Very few (if any) desktop workloads require > 100MB/s of small file random writes, I would gladly trade some performance there for higher numbers in a fragmented state. Idle time garbage collection just seems like an ineffecient way to do things, you end up dealing with very high write amplification and potentially harm the overall user experience when you're not idle as a result.
In the end I welcome the 830 as another high-speed option in the 6Gbps space. We have a number of great performers to choose from, but what matters most today is reliability and solid validation testing. The Samsung SSD 830 may be able to join Intel's SSD 510 in delivering both of those without sacrificing performance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
99 Comments
View All Comments
Out of Box Experience - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Compatability?As far as I am aware, Intel and Samsung were the only drives compatible with XP and every other OS out of the box
Am I wrong on this point?
I believe ALL other SSD's require Partition Alignment for compatability
It would be nice to get an update to see if ANY newer 6Gbps are compatible with every OS out of the box like the Samsung 470 and Intel drives
Is there a compatability list floating around somewhere Anand?
A Google Search turns up no reliability issues from anyone who actually knows what they are doing either
If you want to find hundreds of reliability or compatability issues, just visit the OCZ Forum or go read the Newegg reviews
or go sleep it off
extide - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - link
EVERY SSD should be 4KB aligned for best performance.Out of Box Experience - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - link
Intel and Samsung SSD's do not require end user alignmentOnly SSD's that do not have the offset in firmware require alignment
kake - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
I like your mic.sequoia464 - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Quite a bit more juice running through them than the other drives - is this partly from the 256 mb cache?tipoo - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Even the most power hungry SSD's don't require any additional cooling. It may look big on the graph, but that's still sucking way less power than most things in your system like the processor, graphics chip, etc. It just won't produce that much heat.sequoia464 - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Thanks, Reason I asked is that My Toshiba based Kingstons seem to run (at least to the touch ) cooler than my both Intels and Vertex2's. (not that they are hot by any means, just warmer).Probably the workload and usage that is at play here - now that I think about it.
name99 - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Different people have different concerns.Yes, if you install this in a desktop box power is not an issue.
If you install it in a laptop, the concern is probably not the thermal load but the maximum power draw. If your laptop is not specced to handle that, you'll find the machine crashing when you do a lot of back-to-back writes.
Same thing if you hoped to use it in a USB enclosure, whether USB2 or 3.
Jaybus - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
Probably a combination of things. Certainly, the DRAM is much larger than what is used by the other drives. Also, notice that this 512 GB version is being compared to 256 GB drives, so right off the bat its flash is taking twice the power as those it is being compared with. This was mentioned in the article. Samsung has not yet supplied a 256 GB version for testing. So I doubt it is a controller issue. Probably just the fact that it has twice the flash.infini - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
I don't think Intel is the king of reliability with the 8mb problem of the 320 series. Beenthere can you provide a link with compatibility and reliability problems of Samsug drives?