Official 4 weeks w/Samsung 470, Love It!

I never realized how much of a battery-saver this was, I mean, wow. I'm totally blown away by how much energy it saves by not having spinning discs. It's actually quite insane, I heard they consumed less power (SSDs in general) but this has effectively increased my battery life by so much. My battery was dying and had about 19% wear on it and I would get about an hour on normal use but now I'm seeing an extra hour with the same battery, is that even possible?

I am not getting marketed speeds with the my current drive, but I think that's because I'm using it as my primary drive. I must admit that for a 256GB Drive, it has really won my praise. I followed tiller's advice and decided to create a partition with 180 GB in-size that was I would allow the rest for garbage collection and etc. I wasn't sure how much I should do, but I figured since the drive is 256GB, I'd say that just about 70% of the overall size should be enough.

I would definitely recommend this SSD to everyone that is looking for a boost in performance and increased battery life. It's SATA II, but it's definitely worth a look.

 

Hmm, I'm curious now if a 470 would be even more power efficient than the 320 Series I've found pretty impressive (though not quite doubling the battery run time).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7766632-post2079.html


Thanks for the mention, too!

 

IIRC, Samsungs are good with increasing battery life. However, generally the battery life across SSDs won't be too impressive. My 320 only gives me 15-45 extra minutes (never really bothered to check between HDD and SSD; I get 7-8hrs on a charge).

I wouldn't necessary cast a (slight) negative light on SATA II drives (SATA II, but...), since even a SATA II is much more faster than any 7200rpm (even 10,000rpm) hard drives.

 

Yup sure thing, but the thing is the previous Seagate drive I had installed in my laptop was always power hungry and it would spin-down/spin-up whenever it felt like so it was just draining power. The fact that it was a 7200RPM drive probably had something to do with it.

But now, with this, I hardly notice anything at all, the best part is when I'm transferring stuff over to my external, it doesn't even feel like it's doing work. The amount of power it consumes over time is seems to be close to nothing, I think drives like these and the Intel drives are going to pave the future, especially in terms of green and efficiency.

One thing to definitely write home about is the performance to power consumption ratio, which is not only shocking but outright ridiculous. I thought the Crucial and Intel drives were the king of that, but this little sneaky drive came out of left-field with its numbers.

 

On my Toughbook I could get 6 hours without fail while running the screen brightness at 1100 NIT's. With the 2nd battery installed it adds another 2 to 3 hours. After the 470 install I get 10 hours everyday. It's plugged into my dock at night and I pull it out around 7:00 am for the rest of the day. Never having to charge it.

 

Wow, someone that gets it. Most people would complain about not getting advertised speeds and not understanding that drives are reviewed as a blank secondary drive, not the drive that the system is running from which slows it down.

 

Thanks man, yeah, most people don't understand that at all. I'm just glad it's working and I don't have to worry about getting a new battery for an additional 2 months.

The battery life gains are tremendous, the new one is supposedly better, perhaps I should have waited a little bit longer to get that I guess. But I don't have a SATA 3 laptop, it would've been counter-productive.

 

Interested now in the Samsung drive. I own a 160GB Intel 320 SSD and a Crucial M4. The Intel is in my MacBook Pro, and while it has given me a huge speed boost, the battery life gains aren't that noticeable. Maybe an extra 15-20 minutes.

I've actually heard that the Samsung 470 drives are the same exact ones that Apple ships in their MacBook Pros. Can anyone confirm this? That would mean, in theory, that an aftermarket upgrade to a 470 would support TRIM right out of the box. Macs only support TRIM on factory-shipped SSDs (sadly).

The Crucial M4 128GB sits in my HTPC, but I'm thinking of throwing it in my ThinkPad T420. We'll see if I can find a deal on a smaller SSD for the HTPC.

 

Apple does use the 470 with a different FW from what I have read. there is another brand that one can get as well. It's basically a crap shoot, just like the screen. One is made from LG, don't remember the other.

 

The Samsung 470 currently has the lowest power consumption rating out of all the SSD's out right now.

The newer Samsung 830 increases power consumption but increases speed at the same time.

If battery life and reliability is your main concern, then I suggest you go with the 470.

If performance and reliability is your main concern, then I suggest you go with the 830.

Keep in mind that both of give you MUCH greater performance and battery life than a comparable Hard Disk drive.

The difference between the 830 and 470 is most noticeable in the performance department.

The difference between battery life between the two isnt quite as large as the performance difference.



Samsung 470




Samsung 830




All of the components inside both drives are made by Samsung in-house: NAND chips, RAMs and even the controllers.

The 830 has a Tri-core ( 3 core ARM9) controller. Most usually have dual core.

 

The 830 has no advantage over the 470 when it's used with SATA II, probably the performance is worse.

 

yeah, but how does the 830 compare to the 256gb m4 in performance and power consumption?

 

830 > 256gb M4 in performance, I'm not sure about the power consumption as it has had a varied testing.

Edit: By varied testing I mean, Anandtech saw 3.5 watts of power in take but TechSpot did their own review and found it was slightly above the last model, but not by much.

 

I didn't see such a big different with power consumption with my M4.
I gained more or less 15/20 min battery lifetime, I wish I could get a 45 min or more.

My HHD by the way its a Seagate 7200rpm.

 

well, the disk in your notebook is the least of your worry when it comes to energy consumption. Next to 740qm and 17" screen, disks consumption is mostly irelevant whichever disk you put in the machine.