back to article Samsung SSD 830

When it came to putting together a list of SSDs together for your latest upgrade, one name that you could easily overlook until recently was Samsung. Compared to its rivals in the marketplace the company hardly trumpeted its solid state storage products. Samsung SSD 830 solid state drive Samsung's SSD 830: 256GB is an …

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  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
    Devil

    At these hard disk prices...

    At the silly prices charged for spinning platter at this particular moment in time this makes quite a lot of sense :) Temptation... temptation.,..

  2. Mikel
    Go

    Watch out

    Samsung is the new HP.

    1. Richard Wharram

      Mmmm, Sausage and Samsung sandwich...

  3. Giles Jones Gold badge

    I've given up on SSDs for now. Maybe I will go back to one when they are more proven and reliable. Someone inventing flash memory that doesn't have such a limited lifespan will help too.

    It's no fun having your OS partition corrupt about 3 times in a year. Although that may be just Kingston drives (and I do have the latest firmware on it).

    SSD drives are one area where solid state is actually inferior in reliability to mechanical.

    1. Craig 12

      It sounds like you have a dud (drive, cable, mobo socket, Rev A sandy bridge?). All my SSDs are well aged (mix of samsung, intel, corsair) and working fine, even without extra settings/maintenance.

    2. Random Coolzip

      Re: reliability

      Samsung lists the MTBF for the 830 series drives at 1,500,000 hours. I don't know where they're getting that number from, but it's way out of line with the lifetimes I've observed. Everyone I know with an SSD just budgets for a replacement drive every 14-18 months, and keeps good backups.

      1. R 11

        Why every 14-18 months?

        Why would you budget to replace a drive every 18 months when it comes with a three year warranty?

  4. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Still far too expensive

    To tempt the masses away from using spinnig platters of some magnetic oxide.

    Cut the price of the lower specced 256Gb (and upwards) drives and you will get a lot more sales.

    With even basic laptops coming with 320Gb and more capacity HDD's these days, it is hard to swap one out with a 64Gb/128Gb SSD drive that costs the same as the 320Gb HDD

    1. David Robinson 1

      Argh! Pet Peeve!

      b = Bit

      B = Byte

      You have effectively reduced the reported capacities of the SSDs to an eighth of their actual size.

  5. brym

    dabs

    dabs are already on the 128gb's for £165: http://goo.gl/l2eGa

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "All the chips are built on to one side of the PCB, unlike its predecessor that used both side of the board."

    Presumably the top of the range 512 is dual sided (assuming double quantity of the same chips).. as this test sample was only 256gb.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazon shafting the UK on pricing

    64GB model - £99 amazon.co.uk, €99 amazon.de

  8. tmTM

    Value

    Corsair 120GB Force 3 is currently £119 on eBuyer,

    Just as fast as the OCZ and Samsung drive (if not a little quicker).

  9. 100113.1537

    SSDs only lasting 14-18 months? What are you doing with them? I maintain a (small) fleet of notebooks which have all had SSDs for the past three years. All used as primary machines with no performance problems to date.

    And as for size, 320 G on a notebook? If you are storing that much, you either are not portable (and why bother with a notebook or SSD) or you are not using half of it. SSD gives great storage/weight and particularly storage/power so it is ideal in a portable medium. On anything else, yeah, disks are much cheaper.

  10. Darling Petunia

    Lovely, but too much gloss

    I recently installed an 128GB 830 in my Lenovo X220. I'd appreciate pro/con comment on encrypting the drive. The web offers up warnings, and not, on introducing software encryption into an SSD. Whether it be Bitlocker, TruCrypt etc., apparently large reductions in read/write speed results.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MTBF is a joke

    None of the MTBF data on HDs or SSDs is even remotely close to accurate so don't use that as a reference of reliability.

    The sad fact is consumer grade SSDs from all major brands have had issues and continue to have issues. This includes Intel, OCZ, Micron, Corsair, Samasung, Patriot and the rest.

    As Anandtech stated a few months back: Consumer grade SSDs are "immature tech" and consumers should wait 6-12 months to see if the major Bugs get resolved. Crusical just confirmed yesterday that their M4 series has a "5200 hour" Bug where the SSD re-boots every hour... Current consumer SSDs are NOT ready for Prime Time yet.

  12. Robert E A Harvey
    Holmes

    obvious questions

    >Magician software, which has a number of tools to keep

    >your drive in tip-top condition.

    eh? What do they do?

    do they do it on Linux or on a Mac as well?

  13. robinlawrie

    cant say ive had the same experiences with my ssds.. a pair of corsair p128s in raid 0 as my system drive. for the last 3 years. never had a sniff of a problem, beyond some slight performance degradation that can be fixed with the odd infrequent rebuild.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    While it's true...

    ...that some folks haven't had SSD issues yet, that does not mean millions of other SSD users, haven't. Many people seem to falsely believe if they don't have a hardware or software issue, it doesn't exist. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially today when companies are rushing half-baked crap out the door for windfall profits.

    Thankfully with the Net these product defects can easily be confirmed by thousands of customers in a matter of hours and negligent manufacturers can be pressured to correct the defects that never should have existed when the product was shipped..

    1. Gordon 10

      Or

      The power of the Internet can show that a tiny minority of people have a problem out of millions and in fact likely exactly correspond to the defects figure the manufacturer has measured internally.

      One of the big problems people have is assuming that a few vocal people on the web having a problem equates to a major issue as tgey have no conception of the true numbers involved.

      Not saying there are not issues - just that sometimes human nature tends to magnify them.

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