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Samsung PM830 SATA 3 256GB mSATA SSD Review – Ultrabooks To Gain Capacity and SATA 3 Speed

Les Tokar February 29, 2012 44 Comments

SAMSUNG PM830 6Gbps 256GB SSD COMPONENTS

News of the day for the PM830 is that it is equipped with four modules of Samsung’s own mlc 20nm-class Toggle DDR NAND flash memory ( K9UHGY8UCB-HCKO)  with each module being a massive 64GB in size.  Up until today, that was unheard of. This results in a total RAW capacity of 256GB, however, formatting reduces available user capacity to 238GB.

The heart of this SSD is Samsung’s own S4LJ204X01-Y040 3-core ARM controller which sits just above Samsungs 256MB DDR2 SDRAM cache memory (K4T2G3140F-MCF7).  The PM830 has AES 256-bit encryption and a write endurance of up to 625TBW for our 256GB sample. Power specifications for the PM830 are Idle – 27mA/0.087W and 911mA/3.007W.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO V. 4.14

Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, power on information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not greyed out as with AAM and APM

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  • 1806

    we all waited test PM830 256GB SSD in Toshiba Z830 ultrabook…
    why you test ultrabook SSD in desktop?!

    • As stated in the article, we could not get the SSD to run at SATA 3 speeds in the Z830 as we did with the T50 in its review. We are hoping to have an ultrabook in the office very soon that will enable SATA 3 testing and this review will be accordingly updated.

      • 1806

        OK, thanks.

      • Ron

        Is the pm830 at least as fast as the OEM SSD in the Z830?

      • Much more so… I will try to dig them up after CEBit!

  • aus_k

    I hope that you’ll keep pestering Samsung to make this drive available through retail channels, I’m waiting to buy one for my late 2011 hp Envy 17 3D.

    • Les

      Thanks for commenting on this as you are not alone and Samsung takes a close look at all product reviews and comments such as yours.

  • erm

    the arrow in the pcmark vantage results chart is pointing to ‘pm800 msata’. should it be pointing to the ‘pm830 256gb’ result higher up, or is that a typo?

    • Negative, that is the correct position, however, the model should be 830 and will be amended Tx!

  • Machupo

    I would love to be able to buy this in the retail channel as I’m building a “small as possible” top end gaming rig — this would make a great drive to run everything off of. The Runcore 120GB just isn’t quite big enough to get everything I need on it. Guess we’ll have to see where the price point lands for this drive, but I really hope that Samsung gets it into the retail network!

  • Bob Pierre-Paul

    Great article on the state of the [samsung] art. Do you know what processors are slated for “Rev B” Series 9? I’ve been patiently waiting for the next version of their S9. Cheers.

  • According to teardown pics, these Samsung PM830 128GB and 256GB are the drives shipping in the new Dell XPS 13 ultrabooks.

    • ince 2007.That would make sense since they have had a great SSD partnership since 2007.

  • Staindsoul_18

    there is both listed though, pm830 and pm800 and the 830 has a vantage score of 62334

    which is correct? 🙂

    not that it matters until Toshiba get the proverbial finger out of course and enable SATA3 on the Z830……come on tosh, sort it out, i want to use my laptop as god intended, not useless toshiba did 😉

    • The new Samsung Series 9 is fully Series 3 capable so it seems.

  • Alexion0001

    When wil this mSATA 256Gb be available on the market…not the 2.5″ version that is 7mm high, but the one that is 3.8″ and 50mm wide, that will fit inside of the Portege Z830/835? Or is there actually a full 2.5″ that will fir in the Portege? I thought that even at 7mm, it would be too thick to fit inside of the Z830/835….Or am I incorrect on this? I also thought that the argest size available in the mSATA size (that fits in the Z830/835 is the new 256GB that just came out by Samsung, and that has not hit the maisntream market….Please someone enlighten me as to this….Thank you in advance for a quick resonse…

    • The 256 is shipping in oem notebooks presently and will not be available as a retail sale. the best shot you might have at getting it might be through Dell parts or Ebay I think. You CANNOT get any other but the standard mSATA SSD in the Z830/835 series ultra as there is abs no room.

  • Alexion0001

    You are correct, thank you so much! I just ordered my 256GB Sata III mSata Samsung SSD from Dell Direct for $499.99 + Shipping and Tax. Their reference is: Solid State Drive,256,S3,FULL,MCARD,PM830. I will be getting it on Tuesday. I will let you know how it fares. I will also upgrade the ram with single 8GB SoDimm and see how much ram it will recognize, hopefully the full 10GB but at least it should recognize 8GB. I will keep you posted

  • Alexion0001

    You are correct, thank you so much! I just ordered my 256GB Sata III mSata Samsung SSD from Dell Direct for $499.99 + Shipping and Tax. Their reference is: Solid State Drive,256,S3,FULL,MCARD,PM830. I will be getting it on Tuesday. I will let you know how it fares. I will also upgrade the ram with single 8GB SoDimm and see how much ram it will recognize, hopefully the full 10GB but at least it should recognize 8GB. I will keep you posted

    • professorai

      I just got the Toshiba z830 full up. Very nice machine, except for the 128M msata ssd limit, which has like 80g free after the recovery partitions and Windows 7. Dell doesn’t seem to have the drive anymore unfortunately. Please post your experience with swapping in the 256g drive!

    • tziman

      Do you have a part number?

  • Jeff Powell

    So what size drive is in the new Series 9? Is it a 128GB version of this drive, or is it a 1.8″ mSata Drive? (I hope the latter so I can upgrade at some point)

    • I haven’t opened the new series 9 as of yest and am actually contemplating such purchase in order to do a review.

      • Jeff Powell

        I bought one last week and I am trying to decide between it and the ASUS UX31e that I bought a week ago. The difference being that it has a 256gb drive, but is the slower SanDisk and only has 4gb of ram. If I keep the Samsung I will upgrade it to 8GB of ram probably get it done by Best Buy…because Samsung said if I opened the case I would void the warranty, but Best Buy wont. Anyway at that time I will take a peek…it would be kind of sad to pay 500 bucks for a 256gb drive…its nice, but the track pad is quirky, and the battery from my tests is still short of the ASUS…but it looks nice. The drive does seem to be a bunch faster than the SanDisk for sure.

      • You are obviously speaking of the new ver Samsung Series 9 laptop. Can you run a Crystal or ATTO test and let us know if it is running in SATA 3? This answer is still not public.

      • Jeff Powell

        So using Crystal, I am also running Microsoft Security Essentials so I dont know how that will affect things…

        How do you tell its running in Sata 3? From what I can tell the numbers I am getting are quite a bit lower than the values you got before.

        SEQ: 449.8 Write: 262.9
        512K: 312.3 Write: 227.0
        4K: 20.97 Write: 49.88
        4k QD32: 286.4 Write: 95.21

        If you send me the info on how you want the test ran I can do so, my email is powel.jeff gmail.com.

        I can tell you this much the battery life isnt as good as what the ASUS UX31 is. …kind of sad. Still trying to determine if I want shorter battery life and 8gb or ram or long battery life with max 4g….maybe I need to see how well my soldering skills are..lol

      • Jeff Powell

        Oh and here is how the drive shows up in the device manager:
        SAMSUNG MZMPC128HBFU-000

      • It is good to see they have their brand new release in their already. Word initially was that it would not be included in first round release units and that Samsung may have used Sandisk SATA 3… Glad to see they never.

      • Jeff Powell

        Ok I posted an image from ATTO to Facebook. I hope that helps.

      • I saw it and it verifies that the new release is SATA 3 which is excellent. I was on the line with two very key people from Samsung yesterday, both of whom could not answer that question.

      • Gerry Thomas

        According one source, who dismantled the unit, the SanDisk 128GB mSATA SSD in the Series 9 is SATA 3.

      • The new release of the Series 9 is SATA 3 while the original is SATA 2.

    • Gerry Thomas

      The New Series 9 UltraBook is shipping with a SanDisk U100 128GB SSD inside rather than the Samsung PM830 SSD

  • Gerry Thomas

    You may be surprised to know that The New Series 9 UltraBook is shipping with a SanDisk U100 128GB SSD inside rather than the PM830. I was going to purchase one until I found out about this dilemma. I also don’t understand why Samsung does not offer the option of a 256GB SSD for this revision “B” version of this UltraBook. I just do not understand Samsung’s thinking anymore!!!

    • I agree totally especially since we have reviewed that drive?!?!?

  • Parv

    how did you install windows 7 using this drive? I threw in Mushkin Atlas msata 240Gb into a Z830…bios recognizes but windows 7 installation will not…thanks

    • I have done same with any number of mATA drives. Have you gone into Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management and initialized and formatted your Atlas? Sometimes drives aren’t recognizedband this has to be done.

  • Parv

    I have successfully install Mushkin Atlas msata 240Gb drive in the Z830 model … but I am not getting the full Sata3 speed …Regards

    • Right….. the reason I hit full speeds is not known and several have reported that the Z830 will not attain full SATA 3 speeds…

  • sleeper52

    the samsung pm800 MZMPA128HMFU 128gb is really cheap now.

    What would be the major differences between this PM 830 model to the PM 800 model i listed above?

  • Peter

    Dear Les,
    with which version of magician did you try to secure erase (Performance Optimization) the SSD? I think of buying the pm830 mSATA drive and would be dependent on the TRIM/Garbace Collection function of Magician because I still have to use Win XP for compatibility reasons …
    did the pm800.work with Performance Optimization of magician? actually it wouldn’t make a big difference performance-wise because my notebook has still a ZIF/PATA interface which is rather slow anyway … (i’m going to use a ZIF to mSATA adapter)

  • ogeek

    I just picked up a brand new one of these out of a broken HP spectre xt. I have been trying to find some power consumption measurements on this to compare to the 840 pro 128gb. I have both drives and plan on putting into spectre xt 15 trying to get battery life up as much as possible.

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