Samsung 830 SSD

Samsung 830 Series SSD 512 GB Review | techPowerUp

 

Realized the error messages I was getting for performance optimization and provisioning in Magician had to do with incompatibility of the app with GPT . That sucks as GPT is not a new tech and I don't want to dumb down my machine to MBR . Anyone knows when Samsung going to sort this ridiculous issue?

What are the alternatives to run TRIM and CG manually oppose to let Win7 does it automatically?

 

How is it ridiculous? What's your reason for using GPT on a SSD? How is it "dumbing down"? About the only reason that most people would want to bother w/GPT is for drives >2 TB, which your SSD isn't.

I bet you dollars to donuts that 90+% of SSDs floating around on Windows machines are not using GPT.

 

There are more to GPT than support 2TB+ drive, all enhanced partitioning and better management of Partition tables plus other features which i am sure you can read about.

When the motherboard manufacturer and Windows offering me the better solution, I don't see why I should bypass it because of a vendor which hasn't done much to provide thorough compatibility. After all it is storage technology and versatility is the key.

GPT is quite typical these days, it is part of Win7 "standard" installation procedure with most current motherboard (EUFI is enabled by default of most mainboards).

when I pay premium for a product I expect to get the premium result. The lack of manual control of TRIM and CG is a big deal and Samsung must address the compatibility issue soon.

People tend to follow the rest like sheep and say why GPT and things like that. the truth is majority lack the comprehensive understanding of what they are talking about. only repeating what they have heard and seen in forums

 

And, how many partitions do you intend to create on an SSD? How often do you intend "manage" partitions on your SSD? My main machine has a whopping 1 large partition for my 160 gig SSD. The other machines between myself and my parents which have SSDs have a whopping 1-2 partitions.

Seriously, MBR for drives <2 TB has worked fine since for AGES.

As for "Samsung must address the compatibility issue soon", you should call them or create a support ticket w/them. Somehow I doubt this is very high on their priority list compared to other things.

I still don't see a good reason to use GPT on an SSD.

 

Having quickly looked into this again - MBR is what would be the recommended install on current SSD's (less than 2GiB).

The only reason GPT might be considered is the immunity to MBR viruses - but at the expense of breaking a lot of disk utilities and/or backup/imaging programs.

As for performance? I would guess that MBR (plus NTFS) is still the most responsive we can have for Win7x64 systems.

 

Possibly a typo for 2 terabytes? I would suggest using MBR partition tables on SSDs less than 2.2TB, as there aren't too many sub 2GiB SSDs on the market.

 

Thanks for catching that - yeah, 2TiB.

 

Wow thanks, great review actually

 

I know that there are 3 version of package for the samsung 830: two with accessories to mount on a desktop and on a notebook, and a basic versione without any accessories.
But regarding software, I'll find in the basic version the same software included in the other 2 versions?
Thanks

 

I wish i had bought the 830, I did not here`s my story.

I bought the Crucial M4 128GB , and it`s worked great in a number of notebooks i have tried it in, but for some reason i get a bsod when coming out of sleep mode, when using Intel sata controller, If i use the standard Microsoft one, i get a bsod only now and again, I have the latest firmware, I have an Ivy Bridge Notebook see sig, but my previous notebook was an Ivy Bridge also with the same i7 cpu and it did not bsod, also i am now using an Corsair Force 60GB at the moment and i get no bsods at all.

So i am saving up for an 830 256GB

John.

 

There are some cash back offers from Samsung, have a look at this £130 830 from dabs;
Samsung 256GB 830 Series SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" SSD Basic Kit (MZ-7PC256B/WW) - dabs.com
Promotions - SAMSUNG UK

 

Thanks i did not see that one, +REP

John.

 

My pleasure and Thanks for the Rep.

 

I have the notebook kit and the bare/basic drive.

Apparently, I didn't even open the CD envelope on the basic one. In looking quickly at the CD, it appears that the only software you get that's of any use on the basic drive is Samsung SSD Magician. You can download the latest version from their web site anyway. There are manuals on the CD for Norton Ghost, but you don't receive the Ghost software.

(I'm not looking at the CD now) But, the notebook kit also came w/Norton Ghost, which I ended up not using because (IIRC) it was unclear whether it would copy stuff over w/proper alignment and it said that it wouldn't copy over OEM partitions (I wanted my Lenovo stuff to be copied over).

Do keep in mind that the notebook kit is the only version that comes w/a 2.3 mm mounting spacer, if your machine happens to need it.

 

John, I have the M4 (256GB) in my desktop and an 830 (256GB) in my HP laptop and I clearly prefer the Samsung 830. It screams!

 

Just bought a 64 GB 830 for my file server, works great!

 

Thanks for your answer!
I haven't understood what is the spacer...
I'll need to mount it in a Dell Precision m6700, I think that it has standard 2.5" bay...will I need the spacer to mount the ssd in my pc?

 

It depends. You should look at the service manual for your machine and/or look at how the 2.5" drive is mounted.

For my Lenovo T61p, I did need it, because standard 2.5" drives are generally ~9.5 mm thick and the Samsung 830 is ~7 mm thick. In the T61p, the drive goes into these rubber rails and slides in. There's no cable. If I didn't use a spacer, the drive would move around and probably eventually break connectors. One could possibly fashion a spacer out of paper or cardboard.

For my X100e, it didn't need it since it was mounted via a totally different method. It didn't matter that the drive wasn't as thick as the old one.

For some machines (Ultrabooks, I believe), a 7 mm drive is required. Thicker ones won't fit.

 

Thanks a lot
I'll check the dimensions of the 2 drive bay on the dell

 

Unfortunately, no Crucial drive is compared here but I remember reading that some users stated that one drawback of the Samsung 830 is the relatively high power consumption. Though this is only one review, the numbers here look promising and SPCR (to me) has always had fairly reliable numbers:

Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB vs. Samsung 830 Series 128GB | silentpcreview.com

 

What's important is how it mounts, whether a thinner drive than ~9 mm will fit and connect properly, and whether a thinner drive will move around.

You may have to remove the stock hard drive to figure that out.

The way drives were mounted in my X100e made it irrelevant whether the replacement was the same thickness or thinner than the original.

 

I get my 830 256GB tomorrow , I have been having problems with bsods when coming out of sleep mode, i currently have an Crucial M4 and an Corsair F60 , both give me bsods, i have done clean installs and it still happens, I have ran memtest86+ for 7 passes, ram error free, who crashes says ntoskrnl.exe causes my crashes.

John.

 

Got my 256GB today, 14 sleep resumes and no bsod so far

Has anybody in the UK manged to get their £20 cashback, I tried on the Samsung website but it seems messed up.

Scores below are from my Ivy Bridge chipset , Samsung 830 vs Crucial M4

John.

Samsung 830 256GB


Crucial M4 128GB

 

You can rest easy and forget about sleep/resume/hibernation related bsod now! My 830 nor my 470 have ever given me sleep/resume/hirbernation bsod's. :thumbsup:

 

Got my 128gb a few days ago. Very happy with the performance. My laptop only supports Sata2, hence the slower speeds

 

I am about to pull the trigger on a 256Gb 830. I have a few questions though. I will be dual booting with Windows and Ubuntu (spending 99% of my time in Ubuntu), and I will also have a separate partition for my data. I am new to SSDs so I am not sure how having multiple partitions will affect the longevity/speed of the SSD. I know that having more than 50% of the SSD full slows it down, does this apply to the drive as a whole or within the separate partitions? Also, from what I read the Magician software is quite useful, but I will be using Linux and I was wondering whether there are any settings that I need to enable in Linux for the SSD? Is anyone using the 830 in a Linux environment? Any tips?

 

My notebook has dual drive bays, I have my 830 256gb ssd as my boot drive and an 1tb hdd in the other, I moved my virtual memory file to the hdd, and disabled system restore on the ssd, wish i could move it to the HDD, but as far as i can tell you cannot, so now using Acronis 2012 to make an backup to my hdd every two hours after the first complete backup the others are only incremental, files that have changed and it`s only taking 30 seconds to do that.

John.

 

Looks good! I couldn't get mine to hit a read speed of 520 MB/s either but it's still plenty fast.

 

I just put the 256gb version into my laptop and have been getting consistent low 800 benchmarks. Love this thing.

 

Source URL?

 

Bit of info.

SSD Overview | Samsung Semiconductor Global Website

John.

 

I don't have a source, I specifically said that I am new to SSDs and didn't post this just so I can say something controversial. I don't know if that's the case and if it isn't I'll be glad to hear what I should expect from the SSD. I was under the impression that the more you fill up the SSD the slower it gets, I don't know if that's true or whether there is some sort of a cut-off at 50% full. Perhaps asking about the effect of partitions is also basic, but I can't seem to find info on it. Also, there's a lot of info on Linux and SSDs out there, but I don't know how good those tips are. I will appreciate any clarifications and help.

 

That is a myth. SSDs don't magically slow down when they hit the 50% mark. However, if you keep your SSD over 80% full for a long period of time, you do risk increased wear on the NAND unallocated memory since it will be written over more often. So why does performance take a hit above this? Well you get those fast speeds on benchmarks, only when you're writing to empty cells. Deleted information (ie. recycle bin) only marks the space as free but the data is not erased (hence why you can recover things even when removed from the recycle bin). The downside for data recovery is once you run a complete erase or use garbage collection, it will permanently erase the cell forever. Anyways, back to performance, garbage collection will help clear things up but it requires a minimum amount of free space to perform efficiently. HDDs should similarly not be kept full for long periods of time, but for other reasons that I won't get into here.

 

This most recent Anandtech reveiw of the OCZ Agility 4 goes over this very topic. This SSD specifically sufferes from performance degradation when filled up to 25%, 50%, 80% &amp; beyond. Please follow the link below &amp; read for yourself.


"Interestingly enough, read speed also degraded when tortured, and restored with idle time. This is not typical for non-SandForce SSDs, we'll have to do some more digging regarding this."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6143/ocz-agility-4-256gb-review/8

I think this affects all SSDs although I am not 100% sure myself. Maybe tiller or someone else can chime in on this subject.


Sent from my SPH-M580 using Tapatalk

 

That's exactly what I am worried about (there were a few people here reporting slowdowns too). I read the Anandtech 830 review, but there is no explicit mention of such slowdowns. Degradation at 25% and 50% sounds really bad. If someone can clarify if this is a common issue across all SSDs, that would be great.

Back to my other question, regarding Linux and SSDs, would steps like the ones outlined here be a good idea:

How to maximise SSD performance with Linux

Is anyone here running the 830 in Linux?

 

Well friends let me share few relevant information with you and see yourself who is the best. I hope you like it.

 

Here`s my 2 day old 830 to compare, your total write 3.83 PB , is a 1PB = 1024TB?

Penguin's technical blog: KB MB GB TB PB EB ZB YB

John.

 

NIGHTMARE,

I don't understand. What are you trying to say by the images? Are you saying that Samsung's 830 is the longest lasting so therefore best SSD available?

 

Well here I explain what I'm trying say.

 

Do you guys use the Write-Caching? I wonder if the cache size is using separate storage or its sharing mode. Plus i don't know why i get the funny feel that if using write-cache will somewhat consume more processing on the SSD.

 

Hi.

EDIT : I ran the performance optimization a couple more times and now it`s back to normal, 500MB/s sequential , I wonder why my performance dropped in the first place, i have been leaving my notebook idling so trim and garbage collection can run, but i still got a speed drop?

I have had my 830 256gb for a couple of days and the initial sequential benchmark using the magic tool were approx 500MB/s

Now i am only getting approx 400MB/s even after running the performance optimization , I have 209GB free from a total of 238GB, so it`s not exactly full.

Anybody know what`s wrong.

John.

 

If you're leaving it in Windows, if you didn't know, you might be surprised by how much disk i/o activity is going on while "idle". Try running Process Monitor, for example.

 

I have been using process monitor for years, I know their is always background processes going on, i am not that green, idle just means the notebook is not doing a intensive task.

John.

 

I noticed flash program operation errors that resulted in bad sectors on my Samsung 830 (2.5 months old; FW: CXM93B1Q). I didn't notice anything in Windows 7 (no BSODs, lockups, etc). I remember one hard lockup caused by a Steam game, but that didn't result in any SMART errors when I checked it out using Crystaldiskinfo then. My SSD has been running well-within the manuf's specs (60C), as the highest I've seen it go is 50C on my Y580. I'll be on the lookout to see if SMART data changes occur. The data below is from Samsung's SSD Magician software. FYI, current values for the bolded are 99, which hopefully means that I still have some way to go before failure.

Model Name SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series
ID Description Raw
5 Reallocated Sector Count 4096
9 Power-on Hours 1542
12 Power-on Count 264
177 Wear Leveling Count 12
179 Used Reserved Block Count (total) 2
181 Program Fail Count (total) 1
182 Erase Fail Count (total) 0
183 Runtime Bad Count (total) 1
187 Uncorrectable Error Count 0
190 Airflow Temperature 36
195 ECC Error Rate 0
199 CRC Error Count 0
235 POR Recovery Count 6
241 Total LBAs Written 1867427921

 

I wouldn't be too concerned about a grown bad sector. It will happen over time on SSDs.

FWIW, I have 2 on my over 2 year old Intel X25-M G2.

 

Thanks, I figure that it will take some time before the 10GB I set aside for overprovisioning will be used up.

 

I am seriously considering the 512GB Samsung 830 as the primary drive for a new m6700. The performance and reliability are great, but the power consumption give me pause. I just looked up the power consumption figures for the 750GB HD that is being shipped with the m6700 (It will be my secondary data drive). The HD use 1W at idle and up to 3.5W when active. The Samsung idles at 1.1W and goes as high as 5.8W when active. I have read many reviews that report improved battery life with this drive, which seems unlikely. I suppose, in theory, the SSD is active for shorter periods of time since it is inherently faster.

I am also considering the Intel 520, Crucial M4 and the Plextor M3 Pro. The Plextor seems like the perfect compromise of speed/performance/power consumption (plus the 5 year warranty), but there does not seem to by many reviews of it and it is not widely available (especially the 512GB version). The specs state that the plextor idles at .1W (very good) but uses 5W when active (comparable to the 830).

Any comments, opinions, advice, would be appreciated.

 

The M4 512GB would be my first choice and the Samsung 830 my last - specifically because of the high power consumption 'in use' (I don't buy SSD's to let them idle...).

Note that all 480GB Sandforce based SSD are SLOWER than the 240GB versions (including unfortunately, Intel's 520 Series) - this leaves them out of consideration for me.

Crucial is the only high capacity, high performance option for notebooks right now (and it happens to be one of the cheapest too!).

 

That's true - it must have slipped my mind.

My main concern with the M4 is the spotty track record. Also, I cannot seem to find power consumption figures for the 512gb model (the are likely higher than the 256gb model).