Samsung 830

[JHZR2]

After my thread on upgrading a laptop that would be pricey to replace, https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/assessing-pricey-laptop-upgrade-replacement.166405/

my HD started doing some click noises. Only seemed to have lost a couple photos and a couple music items, nothing big, but it means fish or cut bait.

I like my laptop and it works well, hope to get a couple more years out of it. So I bought a 256G Samsung 830, as its price went down to $389 at newegg.

Ill likely not put it in until the new year, as I need to still buy OSX 10.7 Lion to get TRIM, and a copy of Windows 7 for dual boot.

But I opened up the box when I got it. The thing is a work of art, worthy of being out on a desk, not just inside a laptop.

Pictures:

I never benchmarked my 7200 RPM drive, but it will be interesting to see how the new one feels compared to how I remember the old one...

 

[Colt45ws]

You wont believe the performance difference.
I have a RAID-5 array with 4 drives on a hardware RAID card. I can pull 200-300MB/s off it in sequential reads. It actually outstrips performance of my Crucial M225 (which is a 'old' SSD now) in sequential somewhat. But sequential is rare in reality. Reads are mostly random and that is where SSDs really shine. My top five programs are on the SSD and everytime I boot windows I hit those five on my taskbar as soon as it loads fast as I can and try to hit all five before the first one loads. I have not beat it yet.

 

[wkcars]

Once you go ssd, you never go back...at least for main boot drive...for storage it's still costs too much per gb. You will notice big improvements on intensive drive access times, i.e., boot/startup and when opening programs and files. Very fast write times too but writes are so rare these days, especially when you download, you will be limited by the internet, or when you transfer files from other drives (cd, dvd, external hds) to the ssd those drives will be the limiting factor. Pretty much the ssd will make other parts of your system the bottleneck.

 

[JHZR2]

I have one in my MacBook air. That's why I went with one for this repair. Can't wait!

 

[Rand]

that particular model is amazing. None of the ocz vertex/agility/solid issues.

That and the crucial M4 would be my top picks If I was purchasing.

Not the best price but the 256gb models havent budged yet.

I'm waiting on a 120GB~~ sized one to hit 150$ without a 100$ MIR and I'll snag one.

 

[Colt45ws]

Sorry, dont mean to stray too far off topic; but what ocz issues are you referring to?

 

[wkcars]

Originally Posted By: Rand
that particular model is amazing. None of the ocz vertex/agility/solid issues.

That and the crucial M4 would be my top picks If I was purchasing.

Not the best price but the 256gb models havent budged yet.

I'm waiting on a 120GB~~ sized one to hit 150$ without a 100$ MIR and I'll snag one.


Check newegg there are 120gb that are about $139, don't know if it's the brand you want.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171545
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226152

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Rand
Not the best price but the 256gb models havent budged yet.



Better than the price I almost bought it for last week - $429.

Plus I bought a copy of parallels, and because it was a combo, saved an additional $40.

 

[Rand]

I wasnt saying it was a bad price.

The ocz 3 series issues are the "every 3rd one is a pos that dies within a month or random bluescreen" issue.

I would also prefer a non cheating sandforce controller.

Being they rate the sandforce based ones with compressible data for speed.

 

[Nick R]

Let me know how it works. My next upgrade after my 2500k and P8Z68 this sunday is going to be a better SSD. I'm trying ot decide betwewen the Crucial M4 64GB or the Samsung 830.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Rand
I wasnt saying it was a bad price.

The ocz 3 series issues are the "every 3rd one is a pos that dies within a month or random bluescreen" issue.

I would also prefer a non cheating sandforce controller.

Being they rate the sandforce based ones with compressible data for speed.


Dont think the 830 compresses, but it is still fast.

Im installing 10.7 and win 7 so Ill have trim on both partitions, so no need to worry about sandforce, it seems.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
Let me know how it works. My next upgrade after my 2500k and P8Z68 this sunday is going to be a better SSD. I'm trying ot decide betwewen the Crucial M4 64GB or the Samsung 830.


I wont have an answer by Sunday as Ill likely not install until new years day or so.

 

[Nick R]

I'm only getting my 2500k on sunday, I won't have cash to get one till a few weeks later so it's no big deal

 

[Rand]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2


Dont think the 830 compresses, but it is still fast.

Im installing 10.7 and win 7 so Ill have trim on both partitions, so no need to worry about sandforce, it seems.


I seem to have failed explaining myself.

sandforce is the controller chip that is very popular now.. but neither the crucial M4 or the samsung 830 use it.

the ocz vertex vertex2 vertex3 and various others use different models of the "sandforce" controller chip that you don't get the rated speed unless the data is compressible
if you use random uncompressible data they are slower.

the m4 and samsung 830 (and 470) series both use controller chips that are equally as fast with any data.

so the sandforce can artificially inflate some benchmarks which seems cheeze to me.


They also have been plagued with reliabilty issues lately and firmware issues.

I had 4 bad microcenter 64gb ones made by adata which uses the same sandforce chip as the vertex 2(?) series.

I also had 2 bad agility 2's and 1 bad vertex 3

this is out of about 12 drives.

I now have 3 crucial M4's and amazing (sarcasm) all 3 worked fine out of the box with no issues. The samsung you purchased is also on my short list.

I'd rather have something thats competitive (possibly a tiny bit slower at some operations) and rock solid stable with no artificial benchmark scores.

Than rolling the dice to get my computer to work.

 

[MrHorspwer]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
Let me know how it works. My next upgrade after my 2500k and P8Z68 this sunday is going to be a better SSD. I'm trying ot decide betwewen the Crucial M4 64GB or the Samsung 830.


This is a sight. A defector from AMD joins the Intel ranks.

Next thing you know, you'll be buying a Mac

 

[JHZR2]

Got it. Hadnt considered much of that, I was just under the impression that sandforce eliminated the need for TRIM, which was beneficial when I was planning on just imaging everything over. Since my HD gave signs of failing, Im going to do clean installs to prevent chances of corruption. 10.7 and W7 both natively offer TRIM, so Im happy.

Since Im only running SATA 1.5, I doubt benchmarks will make a difference.

But now I have a drive that if something else on my laptop fails, I can take over to a new laptop. This lets me buy a laptop with the cheapest HDD.

 

[Nick R]

Originally Posted By: MrHorspwer
Originally Posted By: Nick R
Let me know how it works. My next upgrade after my 2500k and P8Z68 this sunday is going to be a better SSD. I'm trying ot decide betwewen the Crucial M4 64GB or the Samsung 830.


This is a sight. A defector from AMD joins the Intel ranks.

Next thing you know, you'll be buying a Mac

Big difference there lol. If bulldozer hadn't been disappointing, I wouldn't have gone with the i5. But it was, so I did. And I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of OCs I can hit.

 

[Rand]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Got it. Hadnt considered much of that, I was just under the impression that sandforce eliminated the need for TRIM, which was beneficial when I was planning on just imaging everything over. Since my HD gave signs of failing, Im going to do clean installs to prevent chances of corruption. 10.7 and W7 both natively offer TRIM, so Im happy.

Since Im only running SATA 1.5, I doubt benchmarks will make a difference.

But now I have a drive that if something else on my laptop fails, I can take over to a new laptop. This lets me buy a laptop with the cheapest HDD.


Sandforce doenst really negate the effectiveness of trim.. It just performs aggressive "garbage collection" while idle which reduces the need for trim. Its a firmware thing. They can design that into any ssd really.

So trim is not needed as much. Just dont run a bunch of benchmarks in a row and you shouldnt see any (temp) performance loss.

I agree its smart to not buy a SSD WITH laptop they usually want several hundred dollars more for a mediocre SSD upgrade.

buying it seperately is cheaper and you can always reuse the factory hdd in a 2.5" enclosure for data backups/storage.