Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup

Internals:

Before we crack ‘er open, let’s check out the thickness comparison to a ‘normal’ SSD. The 830 Series units are all the smaller 7mm form factor. I personally favor this and wish more manufacturers would adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with an SSD being smaller and thinner, especially since the internal PCB of these SSD’s rarely takes more than 7mm of thickness.

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The 830 employs a screwless design and while the design is very clean, it is particularly hard to get into. It’s almost impossible to get inside without breaking some of the small plastic tabs that hold everything together.

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Note the thermal pad on the top (metal) lid. Now for the close-ups:

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  • Samsung controller (S4LJ204X01-Y040)
  • Samsung RAM (K4T2G314QF-MCF7, 256MB DDR2-800 cache)
  • Samsung flash (K9PFGY8U7A-HCK0, 2xnm Toggle Mode, 133Mbps, 32GB/package).

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All chips are on the front, and thanks to Samsung’s high multiples of dies within each package, internals look similar on larger drives, with those other four blank areas populated for a total of 8 flash packages on the 256 and 512GB variants. There was no need for blank pads at the rear of the PCB.

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Here we have the full range of Samsung SSD generations. From left: 32GB SLC G.Skill FlashSSD, Samsung PM800 ‘PB22-J’, Samsung 470 Series, and finally the Samsung 830 Series.

Testing Methodology

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out! 

Test System Setup

We’re breaking in a new Sandy Bridge test bed. Necessary for properly testing these new drives, even with the known issues. To get around this, we are using only the Intel SATA 6Gb/sec ports, which are known to not exhibit the inconsistent performance / connectivity issues. 

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig. 


Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i5-2500K
Motherboard Asus P8Z68-V Pro
Memory Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9
Hard Drive G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD
Sound Card N/A
Video Card Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Video Drivers Intel
Power Supply Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version DX9.0c
Operating System Windows 7 X64
  • PCMark05
  • Yapt
  • IOMeter
  • HDTach
  • HDTune
  • PCPer File Copy Test

 

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