Samsung 830 Series 512GB review

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Verdict:

Very quick and with a huge capacity, but you may want to go for a smaller size for the best value

Review Date: 16 Feb 2012

Price when reviewed: £605

Supplier: http://www.morecomputers.com

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

SSDs are getting larger but, at extreme capacities like the 512GB offered by Samsung's 830 Series drive, you'll still pay extremely high prices: this drive is over £600.

It's a SATA3 disk, and you'll need this faster interface to see the best speeds. When reading large files, this disk is slightly faster than Intel's 520 Series 240GB opposite, but its 375MB/s when writing large files is much quicker, leading to a massive 379MB/s average when reading and writing large files.

Samsung produces its own controller for the 830 Series, which seems to be delivering the goods when handling large files. It's only average when reading and writing small files, though, managing a bog-standard SSD result of 63MB/s - slightly slower than Intel's drive.

The price puts Samsung's SSD out of the reach of most users, but the high capacity does mean it costs £1.18 per gigabyte, which is cheaper than our current best-value drive, the Patriot Pyro SE and significantly less than the Intel 240GB 520 Series disk. If you don’t have piles of cash to burn, you could also go for the 256GB version of Samsung's 830 disk, which is £280 and an even cheaper £1.09 per gigabyte.

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