For quite a long time Samsungs SATA-II PM470 had to compete with much faster SATA-III SSDs. But finally Samsung managed to bring their PM830 SSDs to the market which now also comes with a 6 Gbps interface. Furthermore the drive should also offer very high IOPS regarding read operations.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	Samsung SSD 830, 256 Gigabyte
Capacity	256 GByte
Memory	TOGGLE NAND Flash
Technology	Samsung
Throughput	up to 520 MB/s reading, up to 320 MB/s writing
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise
Warranty	3 Years

Behind the scenes

Finally, with the PM830, Samsung has a SATA-III SSD in its product portfolio. The core of this Solid State Drive is a furhter development of the controller Samsung has already used for the PM470. Meanwhile it is based on a triple core ARM CPU but unfortunately that is almost as much information as Samsung discloses. Regarding specific algorithms there is no further information.
The fact that Samsung still uses a page mapped architecture with the PM830 SSD require quite a big cache. In this case Samsung uses a 256 Megabyte DDR2 Chip to buffer a sufficient amount of data. A closer look at the flash memory reveals that Samsung uses its own 2x-nm Toggle-DDR-NAND that offers 133 Mbps per Interface. To get a reference: ONFi 2.x NAND offers a similar performance level.

Delivery

The test sample that reached our office arrived nicely cushioned in a plastic box but that was about it. the retail version Samsung sells to end users also comes with a 2.5-to-3.5-inch adapter bracket as well as a full version of Notron Ghost 15.0.
Samsung is especially proud of the PM830s nice design. The drive comes with a hairline brushed aluminium plate and therefore leave a very good optical impression.

Page 1 - Introduction / Specs	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Sequential write ops
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Sequential read ops
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - Random write ops
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Random read ops
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s	Page 12 - Conclusion

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