Samsung 830 Series SATA 3 512GB SSD Review – Amazing Performance and an Unbeatable Toolbox

TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

Testing will be performed on an Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z paired with an Intel Core i5 2500K and 8GB of G.Skill DD3 1866. Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology storage drivers version 10.6.0.1002 are used for all testing.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

Software utilized for this review consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities, and PCMark Vantage.  All do a great job of showing us the numbers that we want to see, or don’t want to see in some cases, while PCMark Vantage x64 is an excellent program which recreates tests that mimic the average user’s activity, all the while providing a medium to measure each.

CRYSTAL DISKINFO VER. 3.9.3

Samsung deserves credit for exposing some fantastic SMART attributes with the 830.  In addition to temperature and host write attributes, Wear Leveling Count gives the user and indication of how many program/erase cycles the drive has used.  That attribute also includes a “life indicator” which gives the percentage of the drive’s 3000PE cycles used.  In this case, the 830 is still at 100%. These types of “media wearout indicators” are notoriously conservative.  All in all, it doesn’t lack for much information, something which is much appreciated.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW data, which removes the file system overhead. For our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with zero-fill data rather than random and shows better performance than benchmarks which operate through the file system.

Samsung states the max sequential speeds of the 830 256GB and 512GB are 520MB/s read and 400MB/s write. The 512GB performs near-identically to the 256GB at 408MB/s writes and 549MB/s reads.

About the Author

Christopher Ryan