SSD Experiences - Samsung 830 series

Sniper Ash6

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If you've been reading the PC Upgrade thread then you'll have probably seen that I've got an SSD to play with at the moment. Some of you have already had a go ahead of me and are converts, others aren't so sure and it is those who I'm aiming this at. Last year I had a chance to use one of the Samsung 470 series drives and while it left me with the feeling that the technology had a good future, it did leave me disappointed at the time.

So, I've currently got a 256GB Samsung 830 series SSD (the desktop kit) and the included items are quite impressive - much better than you'd see from other manufacturers.

Included we have:
The SSD (no surprise that one!)
A quick user manual
A copy of Norton Ghost 15.0
A disc containing the Magician Software and the manual
A molex to SATA power adapter
A locking SATA data cable
A 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter - this isn't flimsy or cheap either, it's a solid piece of metal
10 screws to install it all with

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I intend on splitting this up into a few parts, firstly, synthetic benchmarks (Crystal Disk Mark, ATTO and possibly PCMark 7). Then onto what it's like using it as a games drive, followed by using it as the OS drive and finally my overall thoughts on it.

Please feel free to comment and add in any of your experiences, hopefully this will help some people out :)
 

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Just make sure you use either a supersize box of cereal or a Lego Star Wars figure to give a sense of scale for any pictures in the future please Ash!
 
More seriously, I do notice a slight difference in response times after converting and adding a SSD last year, the boot up for me is immaterial, but I did have to jump through firmware hoops to get it to work stably with no BSOD's.

As I am thinking of upgrading to a larger drive (even relocating my user drive and having minimal apps I have approx 15Gb free of 64Gb) I am interested in what the Samsung drives are like.

I have a OCZ Agiity 3 for reference, one of the sandfore 2xxx series.
 
I've got the 128gb version of the samsung and it's very good I have to say. I've only SATA2 so don't get the full benefit.

Boots times are good but only when windows starts. My boards takes its time checking through all the setting when booting. SSD Life doesn't work with it from what I can see tho'
 
It's a really nice looking unit. Shame it's going to be stuck inside a PC.
 
Any SSD is faster...even my old (September 2009) Samsung 128GB SSDs are much quicker than any HDD and I am often the 1st if not among the 1st to load the map in any MP games.

Same here with the Vertex. big change from joining after the first flag was capped. Usually join with 25 secs to go.
 
Just make sure you use either a supersize box of cereal or a Lego Star Wars figure to give a sense of scale for any pictures in the future please Ash!

Hmm, I'll have to find something quirky and unique then :D

More seriously, I do notice a slight difference in response times after converting and adding a SSD last year, the boot up for me is immaterial, but I did have to jump through firmware hoops to get it to work stably with no BSOD's.

As I am thinking of upgrading to a larger drive (even relocating my user drive and having minimal apps I have approx 15Gb free of 64Gb) I am interested in what the Samsung drives are like.

I have a OCZ Agiity 3 for reference, one of the sandfore 2xxx series.

When I had a play with the previous Sammy drive, it was only a 64GB model and space was an issue. I would hate to micro-manage stuff like that but could survive with ease with a ~120GB drive.

Upgrading the firmware on this was incredibly simple, it can be done via Windows, a bootable USB drive or a bootable CD/DVD. I went for the Windows solution where it asked me to grab the latest firmware file, I was then asked where this was and then just hit go. The status bar goes up, it says to complete the process the computer needs to be restarted and that's it!

I've got the 128gb version of the samsung and it's very good I have to say. I've only SATA2 so don't get the full benefit.

Boots times are good but only when windows starts. My boards takes its time checking through all the setting when booting. SSD Life doesn't work with it from what I can see tho'

I noticed SSD Life didn't work as well. I must say, I am liking it so far!

It's a really nice looking unit. Shame it's going to be stuck inside a PC.

It is indeed, some work has gone not only into the internals and into not only the first impression you get of the device but everything else you get in the box as well. While it may be surplus to some people's requirements it's nice that those things are there as standard.
 
After using SSD im surprise anyone would ever want to use a mechanical drive again, for storage yeah.... But not your boot drive.
 
Results of Crystal Disk Mark and ATTO, I will try and get PCMark 7 done as well later on

Ok then, CDM to start with.

What I currently use for my C: drive (a Seagate ST3500320AS):
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What is currently my games drive (Samsung F3 1TB):
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My WD20EARX (I use it as a storage drive):
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Samsung 470 series (64GB):
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Samsung 830 series (256GB):
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A phenomenal difference!

Due to the number of pics I'll have to split this over two posts

Into a table to make it easy to digest:
Drive | Sequential Read |Sequential Write |512K Read| 512K Write| 4K Read| 4k Write| 4K Read, QD=32| 4K Write, QD=32|
Samsung 830 256GB (SATA III) | 510.20| 404.30| 335.60 |261.00| 23.390| 84.010| 278.000| 147.100
Samsung 470 64GB (SATA II)| 222.30 |178.20 |180.10| 127.00| 15.440| 30.150| 16.440| 31.650
Samsung HD103SJ (Recent)| 142.60| 136.90| 44.02| 55.87| 0.507| 1.049 |1.049| 1.072
WD20EARX (SATA III) | 128.40| 97.08| 41.70| 40.83| 0.539| 0.522|1.701 |0.507
SE3500320AS |92.27|89.68| 26.99 |46.96 |0.310| 0.834| 0.511| 0.848
 

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Onto ATTO and in the same order:

ST3500320AS:
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Sammy F3 1TB:
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WD20EARX:
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Sammy 470 series:
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Sammy 830 series:
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Again, a massive difference that in theory should also translate to a massive difference in the real world. I'll keep you posted :)
 
Was the Samsung tested with the fresh-out-of-the-box-efficiency, or had you used it for a while?

You should give it some heavy usage, then run those tests again a little down the line. It should show some interesting differences in performance - Unless the Samsung SSD support TRIM. If it does, then it negates droops in peformance! :thumbsup:
 
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Was the Samsung tested with the fresh-out-of-the-box-efficiency, or had you used it for a while?

You should give it some heavy usage, then run those tests again a little down the line. It should show some interesting differences in performance - Unless the Samsung SSD support TRIM. If it does, then it negates droops in peformance! :thumbsup:

All SSDs support TRIM now, only 1st Gen didn't.
 
All SSDs support TRIM now, only 1st Gen didn't.

Yeah, there's two different kinds - Software (Windows 7) TRIM & Hardware based TRIM.

I think SSDs with Indilinx controllers perform TRIM when the drive is idling - Which is an awesome feature.
 
Was the Samsung tested with the fresh-out-of-the-box-efficiency, or had you used it for a while?

You should give it some heavy usage, then run those tests again a little down the line. It should show some interesting differences in performance - Unless the Samsung SSD support TRIM. If it does, then it negates droops in peformance! :thumbsup:

Both SSD tests are after a format. After doing some synthetic tests on it and seeing what it's like just running games from it I intend to do what I did with the 470 series drive I had before and that is use it as my OS drive for a week. The 470 series drive massively slowed down after the week and I'll post CDM scores after the same period of time showing by how much and if the 830 series does the same thing.

Yeah, there's two different kinds - Software (Windows 7) TRIM & Hardware based TRIM.

I think SSDs with Indilinx controllers perform TRIM when the drive is idling - Which is an awesome feature.

Strangely enough I did ask about TRIM and garbage collection as well as how the Magician software's optimisation (and other features) fit into it all. This was the answer I got:

1.) TRIM is supported natively by all Samsung-branded SSDs - the 470 Series and the 830 Series. In order for TRIM to function, however, the operating system must also support the TRIM command. Essentially, TRIM is just a way for the OS to communicate with the SSD and tell it which blocks of data are no longer needed/valid, allowing the SSD to proactively erase those blocks rather than just leaving them sit there until there is a request to overwrite them. Doing this improves performance because there will be no need to wait while the SSD goes through the time-consuming erase process before it can write to an old/used memory space.
2.) Magician is simply a maintenance utility to help users keep their drive in top working condition (firmware updates, performance optimization, benchmarking, etc.). The Performance Optimization function allows users who are using Operating systems that do not have TRIM support (any version of Windows besides Windows 7) to manually induce TRIM-like functionality either on demand or at a user-defined schedule.
3.) Garbage Collection is a firmware level maintenance feature that requires no support from the Operating System and is unrelated to TRIM. TRIM helps to make garbage collection more efficient by letting the SSD know which data is no longer valid so that it does not waste time moving invalid data around. Garbage collection is simply taking good data and organizing it together, reducing the number of partially used blocks and allowing the SSD to pre-emptively prepare free blocks for future write operations (Remember, SSDs write data in pages but must delete in blocks. So, Garbage Collection is how the SSD moves good data out of a block that contains mostly invalid data so that it can erase the whole block).
 
Not sure if this has been mentioned in here, but if you reload your OS you need to do a Diskpark - Clean All on your disk, to wipe it. Or when you write, it has to erase first as a format does NOT do this.

Also, if you do this and destroy the partitions then your disk will get alligned during the OS install.

If you are reloading your OS and don't know about the above, maybe give it a google or PM me.
 
I bought a Kingston 60Gb about eighteen months ago only running on a SATAII board and at first it seemed faster but as it became fuller it slowed. It has 15Gb free at the moment and I would say it's no faster than my HDD was. I was going to invest in a Crucial M4 256 but don't think it's worth it until I do a major overhall. Your tests prove the SSD/SATAIII speed increase is more than worth it..
It's shown that the latest generation is a massive improvement over the previous drives but how that translates into what you actually experience I'm yet to know/say.

The 470 series drive was only a SATA II drive so wasn't limited in being tested on a SATA II platform.

We are about to see some new drives from some manufacturers but even this, just synthetically, is a massive difference compared to mechanical drives.
 
In what way Ash are these new drives better? I should return to this section as I'm way out of touch.
 
Compare the 830 series drive with the 470 series drive able, the speed differences there are also pretty impressive! Plus you've got the reliability side of things that some manufacturers are concentrating on more than others.
 
Sorry Ash I meant this bit

We are about to see some new drives from some manufacturers but even this, just synthetically, is a massive difference compared to mechanical drives.
 
Sorry Ash I meant this bit
Sorry, from what I know so far they're speed improvements but we'll know more soon. The end of the statement you quoted was probably a tad confusing and was meant to mean that the current drives we have show a great difference in the tests I've shown above.
 
Just a quick one on the PCMark 7 scores:

ST3500320AS: 1490
Sammy F3 1TB: 1846
WD20EARX: 1633
Sammy 830 series SSD: 5218

I'll post up the full scores in a nicely formatted manner later on :)
 
The scores sure look nice compared to normal HDDs. Have you got any other SSD's to compare it to?
 
Unfortunately not

The complete breakdown of PCM results:
Drive | Windows Defender (MB/s) | Importing Pictures (MB/s) | Video Editing (MB/s) | Windows Media Center (MB/s) | Adding Music (MB/s) | Starting Applications (MB/s) | Gaming (MB/s) | Score
ST3500320AS | 1.17 | 4.99 | 14.76 | 7.24 | 1.11| 2.08| 3.71| 1490
WD20EARX | 1.47 | 5.65 | 16.78 | 6.97 | 1.16 | 2.09 | 4.34 | 1633
Sammy F3 1TB | 1.73 | 7.27 | 16.29 | 7.62 | 1.26 | 2.71 | 4.52 | 1846
Sammy 830 series | 5.41 | 28.48 | 22.39 | 8.2 | 1.4 | 53.65 | 16.3 | 5218

It's interesting how it wasn't that much better at the adding music test but all three tests were exactly 1.4MB/s

Links to the results:
ST3500320AS + SSD
Sammy F3
WD20EARX
 

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