Samsung 830 Series 256GB SATA III SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark 7

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: Like the AS-SSD benchmark, the Samsung 830 did splendidly here with a top score in the sequential writes and very close to the lead for sequential reads.

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: While it took none of the top scores, the Samsung 830 Series drive was just a hair off all of the top scores in each category and posted a very good overall score.