Samsung 830 SATA3 SSD 256GB Review

Introduction

We've taken a look at a lot of SSDs in the past year or so here at OC3D, and whilst the controller used can vary wildly between models, we nearly always see the NAND Flash being provided by Samsung.

Of course Samsung are a huge name in the electronics industry, supplying everything from cameras to giant plasma screens. It's their RAM department that we most often come across. Not only do they provide the RAM chips that are in the vast majority of DIMMs, but most of the SSD RAM too. So rather than constantly provide to third parties, Samsung have branched out into producing their own range of Solid State Drives.

Today's review is of their high-end model, the 830. This is available in a variety of sizes from 64GB up to a whopping 512GB and takes advantage of the 6Gbp/s available from SATA3 to hopefully provide huge read and write speeds. The model on test is the 256GB, which nicely balances between price and capacity.

Technical Specifications

As well as 256GB of storage, the 830 comes with Samsung 256MB of DDR2 cache, Samsung's S4LJ204X01-Y040 controller and eight of their popular HCK0 NAND Flash chips. There is no denying that they've grasped the opportunity to keep everything in house with both hands.

• Samsung SSD 830 Series
• Capacity: 256GB
• Form Factor: 2.5 inch
• SATA 6Gb/s (Compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5Gb/s)
• Samsung Magician software for SSD management
• Samsung Toggle DDR NAND Flash memory
• Samsung 3-core MCX Controller
• Samsung 256MB DDR2 SDRAM cache memory
• Dimension : 100 x 69.85 x 7mm
• Weight: 62.5g

• Sequential Read: Up to 520MB/s
• Sequential Write: Up to 400MB/s
• Random Read: Up to 80000 IOPS
• Random Write: Up to 36000 IOPS

• Let's take a look at it.