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The Samsung 830 Series 512GB SSD ships in a very subdued and attractive black box with the product name and capacity clearly listed on the front.
The Solid State Drive itself is protected inside a tough plastic section, which rests above the peripherals.
Samsung supply a very good bundle with the drive, including literature on the product, ‘Magician' software and the very useful Norton Ghost V15. The USB to SATA powered adapter means you have a complete solution for mirroring your current boot drive, for easy upgrade and replacement.
The drive is shipped in a lovely brushed aluminum black chassis which feels ‘textured' to the finger. On the back, the label lists drive specifications. This is a thin 7mm chassis which will be ideal as an upgrade for tight superportable laptops. The drive measures 100 x 69.85 x 7 mm and it weighs 62.5 grams.
The 830 Series features the new Samsung controller – S4LJ204X01-Y040. This is a custom 3 core design from British chip maker ARM which fully supports the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Samsung have opted for 256 MB cache via a single DDR2 based chip (K4T2G314QF-MCF7) and they are using their own NAND flash memory – K9UHGY8U7A-HCK0. This NAND flash memory is built on 20nm architecture and is comprised of 8 chips … each IC, 64GB density.
A complete solution from Samsung, very interesting indeed. strange to see a non sandforce drive today.
Very nice indeed, I like it. Not this size however, 256mb might be good for an upgrade in 2012.
Nice drive, but I still think Sanforce 2281 has the edge in all the performance benchmarking. its a tough one to beat. still good to see competition, drives down prices, right?
Samsung will have a really hard time selling these to consumers, they work well in OEM market, for Dell machines etc, but enthusiasts are slightly more educated and want Sandforce. thats my views on it anyway, based on forums like anandtech and hardocp.
The price isn’t bad,and uncompressed performance is very strong as the test have shown. the issue is that the more affordable drives are slower and Samsung dont seem to be sending samples to review sites (64GB model for instance looks slow as molasses in write test).
I think Samsung are better than any other maker, for the warranty and professionalism of the company. sandforce drives have failed MANY times, remember that.
1st fact: today there is no one type of SATA SSD dominate the market to replace HDD.
2nd fact: current SATA SSD maker more focus on speed rather than reliability, it make many people afraid to invest their money on SSD.
3rd fact: only Intel and Samsung whose making NAND flash, Controller, and Firmware in an integrated way to assure reliability.
4rd fact: Intel has shown weakness in SSD reliability (remember ‘Bad Context 13X Error’), only Samsung who still holding record for reliability almost perfectly.
This is just from my point of view.