Samsung 830 256GB SATA 3 SSD Review – Make Way For Incredible Performance & Lower Prices

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Many new ‘SandForce Driven’ SSD owners who cant wait to test the performance of their SSD often grab this program and run a quick test, not realizing that they are testing with incompressible data rather than compressible data used in testing by manufacturers.  Samsung does not use compression in storage and the best we can show you for this drive is our result with Crystal’s random data sampling.

I am pretty certain that their are many SSD enthusiasts out there who are going to cherish this result as it is the best high sequential write result we have ever seen for a 2.5″ form factor SSD through testing of random or incompressible data.  The average for high sequential testing of random data is actually close to 75MB/s lower so this is an incredible achievement.  Lets take a look at AS SSD benchmark performance for confirmation of this.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.64

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it tests through use of incompressible data which shows us the ‘worse case’ performance scenario in SSD transfer speeds.  Many enthusiasts prefer benchmarking with AS SSD for their needs.

We will always see a bit of a dip between the Crystal random data scores and the AS SSD results as the end result of AS SSD is the average of all tests while Crystal provides the highest result.  The high sequential read of 385MB/s is still going to be one heck of a reach for other manufacturers to make.

There is another difference with the 830 compared to most other drives, in that, it has been tuned to provide high 4k random READ scores whereas we have become comfortable with the 4k random aligned write disk access IOPS result.  Their specs list 80,000 and 36000 IOPS for read and write at 4k aligned random disk access, respectively, whereas we are just a bit under at 73954 and 23414 IOPS.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.  Recently, we published the exclusive public release here and, if you happen to check it out, there is a FREE download of the software!  Lets see how the Samsung 830 Series 6Gbps 256GB SSD fares on Anvil Pro:

Like ATTO Disk Benchmark, Anvil Pro tests with relatively compressible data, by default,  and there is not much difference observed.  We enjoy using Anvil Storage Utilities as its result tells a complete story.  This can be seen with the system identification on the bottom left, SSD identification on the bottom right and results that are a great deal more encompassing than other available benchmark software.

We decided to try and achieve the highest IOPS possible through Anvils user configurable tests and achieved slightly better results.  A close look will show that the READ result of 78110 IOPS on the left was done at 4K – QD128!