TR Forums

Hey,

I'm about to buy a Samsung 830 256 gb SSD. It will be my first SSD and I'm quite excited about it
My question is; this SSD is the one TR reviewed and awarded with golden editors choice ? It seems to be many variants of the same and I just wanted to be sure.

And sadly, it has to be amazon due shipping restrictions and not any other e-tailer :\ Newegg has GRAW:Future Soldier bundle and I cannot get it...

The differences are in the included accessories. The cheapest version is basically just the drive, another that includes a 3.5" to 2.5" drive bay converter, and a third that has a USB cable attachment.

Just in case you are interested, Newegg has been having deals on these models pretty regularly the last couple weeks. Sign up for their eblast notifications, and you can get some good deals (I got my 256GB drive for 209+tax), total was about $230

Thanks for information I had to get it from amazon due shipping&time limitations. I saw newegg's promotions but sadly, It wasn't an option due my limitations.

My friend got the SSD shipped and he will bring it to me 20-22nd july ...ish

I got the drive installed and moved my old OS with Acronis to SSD

I'm not quite getting the "promised" Performance numbers.. Are these numbers normal ? I'm using Intel's SATA3 port of the Z68 board;

Were you moving from a spinning disc to your new ssd? If so the partitions may not be properly aligned for an SSD. It's a good idea to reinstall windows when you get an ssd as this aligns the partitions properly and does some other stuff too (though I don't think this amounts to much more than disabling defagging).

That's about right as far as performance goes. TR has benchmarks on the drive which are pretty close. Realigining partitions is a waste of time and I doubt would offer any notable performance increases.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22401/4

I have a Z68 board and a Samsung 830 256GB as well, I installed Windows 7 x64 on it 4 months ago and this is how it benchmarks now:



Aligned sectors (default 1mb offset), AHCI mode, TRIM, Intel and Samsung utilities report all is well on the storage front. It looks as though aligning your partition would increase the random write speed a bit. I've tried to do this with my work PC that has recently been blessed with a 120GB Intel 330 SSD, but I couldn't get it to align.

If you are ready to do a new Win7 install; there will no need to do a manual align. During Win7 install/disk selection screen: delete old partition -> create new -> format. Done. The default settings will properly align your partitions.

I moved my OS from RAID 0 array of 2x1 TB Samsung F3's. I'm afraid I have way too much things in my OS (120+ gig size) and VS+addon install, 7 updates are a real pain.. So I just used Acronis home and moved the OS. The old partition of the RAID 0 array was created by 7 installer and the partition in SSD was created by 7's disk management tool.

How can I learn about SSD is aligned or not ?

Here is more info:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html

I still recommend you do a clean install. The advantage you gain in the long run will out weight the initial trouble of reinstalling your apps.

My SSD has 1 partition and after checking with diskpart, its seems to be aligned. Thanks for the link and info guys.

I'm aware of goodness of clean install. I may have some time&motivation later on, not now

Bensam123 wrote:

That's about right as far as performance goes. TR has benchmarks on the drive which are pretty close. Realigining partitions is a waste of time and I doubt would offer any notable performance increases.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22401/4

An un-aligned partition can cause all IO to double.

eg

blocks on HD
Block 0 Block 1
0-4095 4096-8191
If your partition is unaligned, doing a read operation to logical block 0 might start at 2048 and end at 6142. So when the OS tries to read in one block, the hard-drive needs to read in two blocks. This will happen for EVERY read.

Same thing for writes. So when the OS writes a 4k logical block to the HD, two physical blocks will need to be changed. This will cause write amplification and wear out the SSD faster.

I know about this kind of stuff because when setting up SAN devices, unaligned blocks can cause quite large performance degradations because iSCSI uses 64K reads/writes and SAN devices are typically shared.

A local SSD has the benefit of much lower latency and a non-shared devices, but the same basic issues apply.