Samsungs latest PM830 SSD series has been around for over a month now. Befor the actual launch we reviewed the 256 Gigabyte drive and now we're going to test the 128 Gigabyte model. Let's see if this one can keep up with the other 120 Gigabyte drives. Furhtermore we're also very curious if the package one gets is able to convince.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	Samsung SSD 830, 128 Gigabyte
Capacity	128 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 in the nicely made retail package. This contians a 2.5-to-3.5-inch adapter bracket as well as a full version of Notron Ghost 15.0 and Samsungs SSD Magician software. The software can be used to perform firmware updates or to simply monitor the drives SMART data. 
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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