Control issues
The major improvement of the new S4LJ204X01-Y040 chip over the one looking after the 470 is its Sata 3 6Gb/s interface. While old mechanical drives are hard pushed to get anywhere near the bandwidth limit of the original Sata specification, let alone Sata 3Gb/s, the same cannot be said for SSDs. The performance of solid state storage is now almost saturating the Sata 6Gb/s bandwidth limit – so much for future proofing.
A homegrown controller and all the chips are one side of the PCB
Just like the 470, all the rest of the 830 internals are Samsung as well; eight 32MB NAND 25nm (K9PFGY8U7A-HC K0) memory chips provide the capacity while 256MB of on-board DDR2 cache helps with handling small files. All the chips are built on to one side of the PCB, unlike its predecessor that used both side of the board.
ATTO results
First off, I performed some real life testing up against one of its Sata 3, the OCZ Vertex 3 equipped with the latest Sandforce controller. Installing Windows 7 64-bit from a USB DVD drive took 14mins for both drives. Installing MS Office 2010 Pro proved quicker on the Samsung at 4mins 20s, the OCZ trailing behind at 4mins 30s.
AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark 3 scores
When copying 100GB folder of mixed sizes and types of files the performance of the drives was more in pronounced. The Samsung 830 clocked up 9mins 50s, the OCZ Vertex 3 rolled in at 12mins 24s and just for good measure I checked out the Sata 2 Samsung 470 too, which took 23mins 15s.
Next page: Quick as a Flash?
COMMENTS
It sounds like you have a dud (drive, cable, mobo socket, Rev A sandy bridge?). All my SSDs are well aged (mix of samsung, intel, corsair) and working fine, even without extra settings/maintenance.
Argh! Pet Peeve!
b = Bit
B = Byte
You have effectively reduced the reported capacities of the SSDs to an eighth of their actual size.
SSDs only lasting 14-18 months? What are you doing with them? I maintain a (small) fleet of notebooks which have all had SSDs for the past three years. All used as primary machines with no performance problems to date.
And as for size, 320 G on a notebook? If you are storing that much, you either are not portable (and why bother with a notebook or SSD) or you are not using half of it. SSD gives great storage/weight and particularly storage/power so it is ideal in a portable medium. On anything else, yeah, disks are much cheaper.
Still far too expensive
To tempt the masses away from using spinnig platters of some magnetic oxide.
Cut the price of the lower specced 256Gb (and upwards) drives and you will get a lot more sales.
With even basic laptops coming with 320Gb and more capacity HDD's these days, it is hard to swap one out with a 64Gb/128Gb SSD drive that costs the same as the 320Gb HDD
