Samsung SSD 830 Series (256GB)

If 2011 wasn't the year that solid-state drives (SSDs) went mainstream, it was a year they delivered newly groundbreaking performance. First came the incredibly fast 240GB OCZ Vertex 3, which was followed by its slightly less impressive 120GB version. Those looking for a lower-capacity SSD had at least one outstanding choice, the 128GB Samsung SSD 830 Series. But when Samsung's drives hit higher capacities, how well do they stand up against OCZ's? Pretty well, at least with regards to the 256GB version ($429.99 list)?though it doesn't come out on top in every situation.

Even so, it has all the features you have a right to expect from a top SSD contender at the beginning of 2012, starting with 6Gbps SATA III. (Samsung's 2010 debut consumer model, the SSD 470 Series, only used 3Gbps SATA II.) More impressively, this 2.5-inch-form-factor drive (which measures only 7mm in height?on the short side for an SSD) is Samsung all the way down, from its stylish and shiny black brushed-metal frame to its three-core controller to the DRAM to the 20nm MLC toggle DDR NAND flash memory itself. Samsung even claims that the drive's wear-leveling and garbage collection technologies are proprietary (though traditional TRIM is supported). You can expect to get about 238GB of usable space from the drive (the remaining gigabytes are dedicated to overprovisioning), and it's covered by a three-year warranty. Other nice inclusions are discs containing the full version of Norton Ghost and Samsung's SSD Magician software for performing tasks like optimizing performance (via garbage collection) and updating the drive's firmware and, as of early January 2012, a free download code for Batman: Arkham City.

Performance was robust as well, with the Samsung drive constantly trading top scores and times with the 240GB Vertex 3. What drive came out ahead and on which task depended on the particular application. On our AS SSD benchmark, OCZ's drive generally did better with reads and Samsung's with writes, and we witnessed something similar on the ATTO Disk Benchmark?up to a point. From 0.5KB to 2KB, OCZ owned the reads and the Samsung writes; at 4KB the two flipped and continued alternating wins straight down the line through 512KB. With results upwards of 546MBps in 128KB, 256KB, and 512KB sequential reads, the Samsung drive even surpassed its own stated performance rating of 520MBps?an impressive feat. (For the record, the Samsung drive also promises up to 400MBps sequential write speeds, and routinely performed above that rating, too.)

It was after that, however, that the Samsung's limitations began to show. The OCZ took the rest of the rest of the ATTO tests?both write and read?up to 8MB, all of the CrystalDiskMark tests except Sequential and 4KB QD32 reads, and all of the PCMark 7 storage trials. The biggest discrepancy we noticed was on CrystalDiskMark's 4KB QD32 Write test: The OCZ delivered a result of 252MBps, whereas the Samsung drive could only muster up 147.4MBps. Combined with the ATTO results, this shows that, when you're more intensively moving larger amounts of data, the 256GB Samsung drive can't quite keep up with the competition.

Based on what we observed, the Samsung SSD 830 Series isn't quite able to wrest our Editors' Choice title away from the 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 (which is also priced at $399.99 list, $30 less than the Samsung)?but in more standard everyday applications it's essentially a neck-and-neck race. Our standard position in situations like this is that, all else being equal, when you're paying this much money for this (relatively) little storage space, you want the fastest speeds possible, and you get those with the OCZ drive. Nevertheless, Samsung's drive is an attractive, consistent performer ideal for slightly lower-level applications, and its larger amount of storage space and free software may help cushion the blow of the marginally slower transfer rates that just keep the SSD 830 Series from taking the top prize.

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