Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive 148
MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Interesting)
That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early. And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do. And if your typical IO pattern is one that will break an SSD, then you should plan for it and determine if the speedup is worth the cost.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias (Score:5, Interesting)
Avoid SuperTalent like the plague they are.
Avoid anything used or refurbished.
Avoid any hybrid solution as they drain more battery.
If you don't need a lot space and need extreme reliability look at intel 311 series (those drives kick ass) or any SLC based SSD for that matter.
If you don't need extreme reliability, but don't want to play a game of Russian roulette with 3 bullets instead of one (like in the case of a SuperTalent drive), look and anything sand-force based.
Since you have an aging laptop, you do not need something that can saturate sata 6Gb/s so try to find something like an OCZ Vertex 2 1 drive or a Corsair Force 1 as in real life they are quite similar (you do not need the third edition (both drives have a V3) in an aging laptop).
Also bench the writing speed only one or two time as the more you bench the slower your drive get, you can usually bring some of it back by emptying the drive by formating it to ntfs in windows 7 and the use a force trim utility, wait about 15 minutes. After that you can reformat your drive to your file system of choice and the performance should be OK
1- In synthetic benchmark they differs a little bit but it is imperceptible in real life, unless your main workload is approximated correctly by the synthetic benchmark you were looking at.