Samsung 830 Series 128GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

There are very few companies capable of making every major component that's tucked away inside a SSD. Toshiba has done it with some of their enterprise models and now Samsung is doing it to. When you control the supply of components, you don't really have to worry about buying in bulk because you control that as well. I suspect that if Samsung wanted they could really shake the SSD world up if they wanted, that is if the new 830 Series was fast enough.

Our Samsung 830 sample has some trick components, kind of like a race version of a street car. There aren't any titanium valves or exhaust, but the 830 does give us our first look at 20nm flash. The flash is of course made by Samsung and doesn't conform to traditional ONFi standards, but it is Toggle Mode and very fast. I suspect it won't be too much longer before we start to see other SSD manufactures taking a closer look at Samsung 20nm flash for their SSD products built on other SSD controllers. The last time we saw a SandForce SSD with Samsung flash was on the G.Skill Phoenix 100GB and that flash was left over from the Indilinx Barefoot era.

Also new for us is the Samsung controller with three ARM cores. The controller connects to your system via SATA III (backwards compatible with SATA I and SATA II) so it's able to break the 285MB/s limits of SATA II when used with a native SATA III chipset. We've seen Samsung controllers in the past, some of the first SSD products we reviewed were based on Samsung controllers and they were very stable and very fast for their day. Since that time Samsung has played a large role in the OEM market providing whole products to all the major players.

Let's start picking at the Samsung 830 and see what peels away.