Samsung 830 vs Vertex III

[rane24]

Hi everybody,i am planning on getting one of these two SSD drives,and i was wondering if anyone could help me in deciding which one to get.Because of my tight budget,i am getting 60/64gb one,and i will be using it mainly for system,booting,small everyday programs and games.I want to know which one of these is faster in benchmarking and in everyday usage,i am only interested in which one is faster,from which one i can squeeze out more speed?

 

[Coup27]

Use bench on the Anandtech main site.

To only be interested in outright speed though is a view which will come around to bite you sooner or later.

 

[rane24]

I actually did look at the bench on anandtech main page and it didnt get me to any conclusive decision because in the speed results were 50-50,in one half the 830 was faster,and in the other half the vertex.I already looked into other specs like stability,reliability etc,and in those aspects 830 is in the lead,but now i am only interested in speed,and which one is faster...

 

[groberts101]

lol.. I was going to point you in that same direction too. Last I looked it's hard to find/compare smaller capacity models in his testing though.

I will say this. I've owned and tested both and at the smaller capacity points you're interested in here?.. the Samsung is snappier and faster overall.

PS. Coup is right on target with his caution against weighing too heavily on benchmarks. If you buy the drive to get caught up in the e-peen'ing?.. sure.. not a bad way to judge. But if you are buying it for real usage scenraio's?.. real workloads can paint a far different picture.

I use thousands $$$ in OCZ hardware and also beta-test for OCZ.. and even I would pick the Samsung in that matchup. That should say something right there.

 

[Minerva]

830 by far.

OCZ is OCZ and I will leave it at that.
Not a fan of Sandforce chips. Even Intel 520.
The new Marvell chips are showing promise.
Indilinx Everest 2 looks interesting but AFAIK it's only currently available in OCZ Vertex 4 flavor.

A 64GB 830 for around $100 is a good deal IMHO.

 

[Coup27]

the Samsung is snappier and faster overall.

Have we converted you?

OP - There's sod all between them in all honesty, but with the Samsung you get a more reliable drive and much better support tools.

 

[rane24]

thank you for all helping,and thank you @groberts for unbiased opinion,because i know that you are regular on ocz forums and you gave me an unbiased opinion.
So,bottom line...all of you suggest i get samsung 830 64gb and that its a better option for everyday usage?

 

[Coup27]

IMO, yes.

 

[groberts101]

Have we converted you?

nope.. not even close, bud. Returned after 3 weeks of "playing".

Takes at least a 240GB SSD to even come close to impressing me these days since raided SSD has surely ruined me by now(benchmarks aside). I would however put it near the top of my "entry level SSD" list though. Especially good for someone coming from HDD for the first time.

 

[razel]

You're going for the smaller 64GB size. If that is your only choice of size, then the 830 is the only choice. Tomshardware did a roundup for drives in that size. Primarily write performance can be close to half as fast as the larger size SSDs. At the end of the day, however, you still won't notice that much difference. The 830 had the least penality.

 

[rane24]

So im surely buying 830..
@groberts It will not be my first ssd cos im using V3 my friend lend me to try it out for the past 10 days..Now i have to return it back..So its time to buy my own...So thats why im asking which is faster cos i dont want to use slower one after V3.

Sent from my HTC Wildfire S A510e using Tapatalk

 

[groberts101]

yeah.. I feel ya. Wasn't assuming this was your first rodeo, but just mainly pointing out that benchmarks alone will only paint one small part of the picture. Usage levels and types of data dealt with on a regular basis will have more impact as to where the real speeds will be perceived by an end user.

TBH, it's splitting pretty small hairs at this level.. but I did feel that the 830 was a decent drive at that capacity point. Likely due to the nand used on it and ability to tweak firmware for that particular IC layout at smaller cpacity points. Wouldn't be filling it up past 90% full.. but that rule should apply to most SSD's anyways.

Enjoy it as I would expect you'll feel the slight gain over that V3. Particularly the write speeds with incompressible data.

 

[rane24]

@groberts I just wanted to ask you if you could clarify only one thing for me...When i test V3 with CDM,on 4K i get 38mb/s in read.And when i look up at benchmark tests on the internet for Samsung 830 on 4K its only 24mb/s.I am asking you this because i read on the internet that 4K has the most impact on everyday usage.
Will this 24mb/s i will get on Sam 830 instead of the 38 mb/s i get now on the V3 be a big difference to feel in terms of speed?

 

[Coup27]

Is anybody else allowed to answer?

Unfortunately you haven't really done your homework on SSDs.

The Vertex 3 uses a controller by SandForce (SF). One of SF's technologies is on the fly compression of compressible data, such as pictures and documents. By compressing the data before it is wrote to NAND, it has to write less to NAND, thus making the speed to write the file more than if it had to write the whole file.

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) uses compressible data for its benchmarks. This means that the Vertex 3 will come out a lot faster than the Samsung. If you tested both drives using something such as AS-SSD which uses incompressible data, they would be much closer.

If you find the 830 review on Anandtech, I'm sure they'll be graphs on random read for both compressible and incompressible data to give you an accurate comparison.

The actual usefulness of this technology is more open to debate. Some claim that the only time the technology is of good use is during the initial OS install and subsequent application install, all of which happen only once. In general life most files are already compressed either before save by their application or by their very nature (eg MP3).

 

[Cerb]

The actual usefulness of this technology is more open to debate. Some claim that the only time the technology is of good use is during the initial OS install and subsequent application install, all of which happen only once. In general life most files are already compressed either before save by their application or by their very nature (eg MP3).

OTOH, email (depending on client/format), web cache, logs, and most common document formats, are not natively compressed, but are highly compressible, and this ends up also including much of what goes into your pagefile. Also, things like MP3s will tend to be WORM, just like OS installs, and thus will be causing hundreds to thousands of times less wear than even small host writes.

IMO, compressible performance should be considered as a bonus, like extra performance from TRIM. Even with compressible data, you can't verify, without testing your own application or set of applications, how much benefit compression can give you.

In addition, WA is low enough that 99% of desktop users will see either device obsolescence or a failure mode other than flash wearing out. So while the <1 potential WA might be nice, is mostly a good feature for future NAND with even lower minimum write cycle specs.

As a bit of a tangent, I'd personally like to see a dedicated write unit, capacitor-backed, with its own RAM, on the controllers, so that on power loss all pending writes to a coherent state could be flushed, but not require keeping the whole thing powered, and at the same time, allow lazy writing, for performance and wear, while power is stable.

 

[bryanW1995]

Even if all you care about is speed, as you stated they are pretty close to each other. I would use reliability as the tiebreaker, so the 830 for sure.

 

[rane24]

I bought Samsung 830 64gb,i installed it ,did all necessary tweaks and the speeds are catastrophycal.I set AHCi mode in Bios,i put the power plan on high performance,i have the lastest version of Bios,also the latest AMD Sata drivers,all the drivers are up to date,write caching is enabled,trim enabled as well,the MoBo is Sata III.

[/IMG]

All other users have 350mb/s on 512k,i have only 250,and on 4k qd32 other users have 300 while i only have 216 at the most.Other bench results are a little bit off as well.

[/IMG]

4k 64-Thrd is 193mb/s and others have about 250 +.
Why are my readings so low,can somebody help?
First time i installed system out of the box,when i saw the results were this low,i did a Secure erase and installed everything again,but the results are still the same.

 

[groberts101]

I bought Samsung 830 64gb...
Why are my readings so low,can somebody help?

you answered your own question there. You are comparing your smaller drive to the 128GB models speeds.

64GB is slowest and 256GB is generally the fastest due to superior IC configs of any model SSD made these days.

Looks perfectly fine and all you need do is google others benchmarks to compare 64GB apples to 64GB apples, is all.

 

[Jocelyn84]

you answered your own question there. You are comparing your smaller drive to the 128GB models speeds.

64GB is slowest and 256GB is generally the fastest due to superior IC configs of any model SSD made these days.

Looks perfectly fine and all you need do is google others benchmarks to compare 64GB apples to 64GB apples, is all.

While I agree with all of the above, wouldn't the lower than usual score also have to do with the AMD chipset not being quite as good?
Edit: My guess is the user below would have better 4k speeds, and thus better overall scores, if they disabled a few things like EIST, C states, etc.

 

[groberts101]

yep.. all those things are true. Hardware does make a difference and I wasn't trying going to confuse matters by getting into how even slight changes in hardware configs and bios/OS power mgmt settings can affect scores by 10-20%(or more) on some setups.

Laptops mfgrs have neutered power and bandwidth for many of the subsystems and that's why they don't fully compare to a PC with almost identical hardware(such as the Intel 6 series chipset). Even ram speeds and OC can have impact due to faster caching and increased headroom capabilities.

Personally speaking.. I buy most gear for performance and even OC the P outta everything I can in life these days. So, I never want Windows, my bios mfgr, or the government telling me to be green when I don't really care to be. The various players involved try to make everything seamless for power to fluctuate up and down so we never know the difference and still maintain the best of both worlds. BUT.. that's sadly not always the case and performance gains can be perceivable for those who like to push limits.

Just didn't want to assume the OP was wanting to tweak that last bit of speed out of his rig. Especially since many are not willing to sacrifice more electricity and heat for that last bit of speed potential. Obviously depends on individual usage models too.