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.
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iq100 - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
Great review, great quality video and sound, BUT please try and speak much slower.If one knows the material ahead of time, your pace is fine, BUT please remember that your audience is supposed to be those who do NOT know the material. 'Pause' is a sound! Practice making a 'pause' sound between syllables. Your articulation is good, but you leave out the intra syllable pause sound!
Ramon Zarat - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
Nice article, but It would be **very** useful to state firmware version of each SSD tested.For instance, the latest 0009 firmware for the M4 series provide an astonishing speed boost of around 20% depending on the condition. It's been available since Agust 25, so I assume the current test was done with M4 firmware version 0009, right?
Information of that significance, we absolutely need to know before drawing any conclusions.
Fun Guy - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
Agreed, that is a HUGE oversight, lending the credibility of the reviews as suspect. If they can't even collect firmware information, what else are they missing? I've read at least two mistakes made and corrected already in this review, with no mention of the updates in the beginning of the thread. Very sloppy.anandtech pirate - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
hey, why doesn't my login & password work in the forums? & when i go to create another account with my username, anandtechpirate, it says its already taken.tommythorn - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
While I generally find Anandtech's SSD reviews to be amongst the best out there, Iwish you would give less value to compression/dedup as any who uses drive encryption
(transparently available on Mac OS X Lion for example) will not benefit at all. Notably,
this _also_ applies to 4 KB random reads/writes, not just streaming workloads.
thornburg - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review, Anand.Can you tell us whether this drive supports TRIM in OS X?
I've heard that the Apple-supplied SSDs finally do support TRIM in the newer versions of the OS. I wondered if maybe this drive (and/or the 470) are supported, since Apple sometimes uses Samsung SSDs.
Thanks.
NCM - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
You can enable TRIM for non-Apple supplied SSDs in Mac OS X using the free TRIM Enabler, see <http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322>.Loremonger - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
I like the video review and "putting a face" on the article. It would be nice in the future to show hands-on footage of the item being reviewed, as well as benchmarking setups and results. I think it would be quite interesting for your readers to see the testing process (heavily edited, of course; I know this stuff takes a long time).As usual, thank you for a thorough and insightful review.
mino - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
476GiB * 1.0737 (GiB->GB) == 512.0 GBThe published TABLE thus DECLARES NO SPARE SPACE present !
I am sure that is not the case, so the table obviously needs fixing ...
Shazbud - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
I am seeing what appears to be a serious inconsistency in the article:The article states (early on): "Samsung SSDs were among the first I reviewed and while they weren't anywhere near the fastest back then, every last one of those drives is still working without issue in my lab today."
In closing the comment "From a drive that I simply wouldn't recommend...." then really confuses me - why would you not recommend this drive? Speed seems to have been the only downside, but that appears to have been traded off for reliability.