In the crowd of hungry tired worn-out journalists at the Showstoppers Tech and Gadget showcase event at the Icon LA Ultra Lounge, right next to a Hooters, across the from the Los Angeles Convention Center, Samsung, like everyone else, isn't showing off anything new. But the particular bobble they have that catches my eye is the Samsung 830 series solid-state drive, released back in October of 2011. It is a sleek little gun-metal black drive thinner than 1/5 of an inch and no weight to it whatsoever. The case is a gun metal brushed aluminum with only the silver raised logo of Samsung emblazoned on it.
This is when I strike it up with Chris Geiser, senior product management at Samsung. Geiser is passionate about the product. He lets it drop that, "Samsung is now spendings $12 billion a year on memory research". Every SDD samsung makes is 100-percent Samsung made parts, from the NAND storage memory to the controller.
Geiser tells me that over the Samsung 830 series SSD's Serial ATA 3.0 6Gb/s interface you can expect to get a sequential read speed of up to 520 MB/s and in sequential writes, a speed of 400 MB/s. The drive has full support for TRIM as well. This is where he really hits me with some cool features of the device, its controller is powered by a multicore Arm9 processor. Three cores constantly focus on one task. One core handles the data writing. Another handles the data read. The last handles constant garbage collection.
This dedicated core for garbage collection is a very good thing. One of the issues with SSD drives is that over time the bits stored in the NAND, while removed from the record of the journal of a file system, are still there and reading and writing over them over and over can cause serious issue and drop performance nearly 50 percent after so many read and write-overs of an SSD Drive.
The MSRP for the drives now are:
- $129.99 for the 128GB model kit
- $229.99 for the 256GB model Kit
- $719.99 for the 512GB model kit
But you can find these on amazon for $139.99, $269.99, and $699.99.
Included in the kit is Norton Ghost transfer/Backup/Recovery software, 5.25 drive adapter tray, USB power / transfer adapter and for a limited time starting this month any Samsung SSD drive sold comes with a coupon for a free copy of the new Ubisoft title, "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Solider".
The bigger thing about this is that Samsung has reached the dollar to gigabyte cost factor for solid state drives. It will only get cheaper.
Photo Credit: Patrick Roanhouse