Good to see the market maturing - different approaches, different drive controllers etc can only be a good thing. Fast drive too! Hopefully by the time I have enough money for something like this they will be a little cheaper.

It would be hard to make an SSD look more sexy than that

Great review and great product, of course, shame the price tag but soon it will drop but it has its perks, 20nm NAND and in house project, the probability of anything going wrong is far more reduced than others

I'd also like to add that Samsung have a great track record as an OEM drive maker in terms of reliability, in particular making SSDs for Apple and other companies. If a non-techy person wants an SSD for their system, you can't go wrong with fitting a Samsung for them and leaving them to enjoy it. :)

Did the SSD division get spun off to Seagate in the Samsung storage deal, if so Seagate must be laughing now, as soon as the price drops they will crush the competition!

not persuaded by ssd's bigger than 60 gb - I know performance is faster but the price diff is to high.

it isn't optimised for such a high and arguably server-level workload. This is a fair decision

No, that's not a decision, that's something they didn't do because they had to hit a price point.

You don't "decide" to optimise a drive's write performance to make it worse. You simply don't optimise it.

This is an important difference.

I'd rather have 1 of these than any other current gen ssd :).

Originally Posted by SpAceman
It would be hard to make an SSD look more sexy than that

QFT

still too expensive

I'm expecting prices to be somewhat lower than RRP. Skinflint has the 256GB listed in Europe as available for £266.06 and the 128GB for £146.45. Prices will probably be a little higher here, but I don't see the difference being too much when they get released in the UK later this month. Only the new Kingston drives compare aesthetically but I don't want to go Sandforce myself so this is looking like my new SSD.

Nice real world drive

BUT

Why the 64 depth server loads tests its not an enterprise class item. Anything higher that 8 isnt going to be hit by 99& of all users ever. Still to expensive tho for what it is, I,m quite happy to stick to the 60 gb drives and big mechanical drives for the mean time.

Great review,I have the 830 sata III 64gig version of this drive and let me tell u its verey sexy and matches pretty much any color scheme,its verey well made and feels of quality when handling,also customer service isnt to bad but like everyone u get ppl that dont speak your language,the read speeds on this drive is crazy fast im alittle over 500mbs and write speeds isnt to bad either i never expected write speeds to be the same thats common since,this drive was so easy to install windows 7 on and took like 5mins from start to finish,im running a i5 2500k and 8gigs of corsair and a asus z68 and its just stupid fast it never lags or slows down always snappy i can have like 30 folders open movies playing and play skyrim at the same time while encoding dvds and no lag whatsoever and i swear its way more stable than a mechanical drive i never have crashes or stuff freezing,I WILL NEVER I REPEAT NEVER RETURN TO A MECHANICAL DRIVE FOR A BOOT DRIVE EVER AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!! also im gonna buy another 64gig 830 in a few days to run raid 0 thats how much i love this drive,if your in the market for your first time buying a ssd and researching which drive to purchase i would deff buy this one without a sweat anyways sorry for the long comment but im happy that i made this choice to buy this drive

It has to be the best looking SSD I have seen, shame you won't see it when its inside. So now we are moving to SSD, what's happening with all HD manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate) I'm surprised they have not started releasing SSD's like Samsung have. What is going to happen to all of those manufacturers now? In a few years (maybe even one year) I don't think anyone will bother buying mechanical drives with the way SSD are dropping in price :); which is fantastic for PC development and gaming etc. However, WD and seagate need to move with the technology or they could get left behind.

FYI this is now only £150 from most retailers making it one of the best SSD to buy at the 256GB segment

Ive just picked one up today

Me too - hard to resist at that price. Been running a 64GB Crucial for the last couple of years (which will be farmed out to my aging laptop to give that a new lease of life). Most importantly for me, having a greatly increased SSD capacity means I can now get all my camera RAW files on there for improved Lightroom performance. Oh yeah, and there's plenty room for Steam too. Wonder if this drive will be the one to see a copy of HL3 installed on it...?

This is on my pc.

Connected as SATA II

256GB

http://forums.bit-tech.net/picture.php?albumid=1092&pictureid=28382

Thought i would share