Newegg 256GB Samsung 830: $189.99 + FS

Newegg

256GB Samsung 830 Series 2.5" SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive SSD (MZ-7PC256B/WW) $190 + Free Shipping *Starts 6/27*

LINK

Deal Live: 6/27/12 at 12:01AM PDT

$189.99 + Free Shipping

Promo Code: EMCYTZT1815

Green for you OP. Red for me buying this like two weeks ago for $80 more :/

anyone know what firmware these come with? are these old stock they're clearing out or relatively new?

Good find. Thank you.

Just because I'm curious like a cat - how does one find out about these Newegg deals before they actually go live or show up in a promo email?

Ihve the 128GB version of this. Excellent SSD. Best part is this is 7mm so will fit in thinner laptops such as Ultrabooks and my Dell E6220. The Crucial did not fit in my Dell.

Green for OP, I'm in for one...

poorfatkid said:   This is a super drive and the price is great. Using it in a Macbook. Just clone your existing drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and your done. Blazing fast. Don't worry about trim. The drive does a decent drive cleaning itself up.

No question the 830 series SSD is currently the best of the best. I personally own 4 of them abit I paid much higher prices However, as good as these 830s are they have no native drive cleanup or over-provisioning support enabled as you suggest so if you are using OS X you WILL need to use some third party program to monitor and perform cleanup operations. Without within a few months thse 830s slow down well below traditonal hard drive speeds. This is a common complaint from OS X and Linux users who did not bother to read the manual included with the 830 series. Even with a Trim supported OS I recommend you still install SSD Magician to enable the 830's over-provisioning feature to take advantage of the 830's optimum performace in Windows .For Widnwos users there is no reason not to install SSD Magician as it automates many features including firmware updates and performance optimization.

Also if you purchased your 830 recently at a higher price, many credit cards have a 30-90 day price protection benefit. Over the past 6 months I have used that benefit 3 times to get back more than 50% of the original price I paid for these increditble SSDs.

cnIsfg said:   poorfatkid said:   This is a super drive and the price is great. Using it in a Macbook. Just clone your existing drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and your done. Blazing fast. Don't worry about trim. The drive does a decent drive cleaning itself up.

No question the 830 series SSD is currently the best of the best. I personally own 4 of them abit I paid much higher prices However, as good as these 830s are they have no native drive cleanup or over-provisioning support enabled as you suggest so if you are using OS X you WILL need to use some third party program to monitor and perform cleanup operations. Without within a few months thse 830s slow down well below traditonal hard drive speeds. This is a common complaint from OS X and Linux users who did not bother to read the manual included with the 830 series. Even with a Trim supported OS I recommend you still install SSD Magician to enable the 830's over-provisioning feature to take advantage of the 830's optimum performace in Windows .For Widnwos users there is no reason not to install SSD Magician as it automates many features including firmware updates and performance optimization.

Also if you purchased your 830 recently at a higher price, many credit cards have a 30-90 day price protection benefit. Over the past 6 months I have used that benefit 3 times to get back more than 50% of the original price I paid for these increditble SSDs.

Since SSD Magician isn't available for Mac OS, any other solutions available?

cnlsfg said: No question the 830 series SSD is currently the best of the best. I personally own 4 of them abit I paid much higher prices However, as good as these 830s are they have no native drive cleanup or over-provisioning support enabled as you suggest so if you are using OS X you WILL need to use some third party program to monitor and perform cleanup operations. Without within a few months thse 830s slow down well below traditonal hard drive speeds. This is a common complaint from OS X and Linux users who did not bother to read the manual included with the 830 series. Even with a Trim supported OS I recommend you still install SSD Magician to enable the 830's over-provisioning feature to take advantage of the 830's optimum performace in Windows .For Widnwos users there is no reason not to install SSD Magician as it automates many features including firmware updates and performance optimization.

I was told the drive does have an algorythm that cleans up the drive during idle periods. Is this not correct? How'd you know that i did not read the manual.

I've been running it pretty heavily for about 6 months with no slow down issues what so ever. Am I just lucky?

Deleted original post. Made mistake....Ordered one. Thanks OP.

badrobot said:   cnIsfg said:   poorfatkid said:   This is a super drive and the price is great. Using it in a Macbook. Just clone your existing drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and your done. Blazing fast. Don't worry about trim. The drive does a decent drive cleaning itself up.

No question the 830 series SSD is currently the best of the best. I personally own 4 of them abit I paid much higher prices However, as good as these 830s are they have no native drive cleanup or over-provisioning support enabled as you suggest so if you are using OS X you WILL need to use some third party program to monitor and perform cleanup operations. Without within a few months thse 830s slow down well below traditonal hard drive speeds. This is a common complaint from OS X and Linux users who did not bother to read the manual included with the 830 series. Even with a Trim supported OS I recommend you still install SSD Magician to enable the 830's over-provisioning feature to take advantage of the 830's optimum performace in Windows .For Widnwos users there is no reason not to install SSD Magician as it automates many features including firmware updates and performance optimization.

Also if you purchased your 830 recently at a higher price, many credit cards have a 30-90 day price protection benefit. Over the past 6 months I have used that benefit 3 times to get back more than 50% of the original price I paid for these increditble SSDs.

Since SSD Magician isn't available for Mac OS, any other solutions available?

For OS X I recommend enabling trim over-provisioning on your 830 using this free program: link

klbarnes1 said:   Unfortunately I bought this drive when it was front paged at $279 from b & h and I thought it was a great deal then. That was only 72 days ago. Sucks! But anyway I have a question for anyone that can help. I accidentally defraged this drive because my tune up utilities started to defrag it before I realized. I stopped it when it was about 1/2 way done. Do u think I damaged the drive at all? It seems to work just fine and I havent had any trouble with it but I was just wondering. A lot of forums say you should never defrag a ssd.

A one time defrag is not going to hurt your SSD. However repeated defraging will shorten its lifespan. If you run the Samsung SSD Magician there is a optimization featue that will check your OS and disable any program(s) and service(s) that are considered harmful to the 830. In addition it will automatically tune your OS for the best performance.

poorfatkid said:   This is a super drive and the price is great. Using it in a Macbook. Just clone your existing drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and your done. Blazing fast. Don't worry about trim. The drive does a decent drive cleaning itself up.

Any similar cloning software for Windows? Preferably free

I tried to stay up to order last night, but I'm in eastern time zone... Just ordered 2. Thanks OP!

On a modern SSD such as this, defrag doesn't really do any harm, but it also doesn't really do any good.

The average Windows user doesn't put any significant wear on an SSD, so even if you defragged once a day, every day, this drive would still make it until the 3 year warranty without failing (for flash wear out) with plenty of margin.

One thing to make sure you do if you run these drives is increase the amount of over provisioning - they come with some ridiculously low number, like 8% OP, which will cause the drive to incur significantly higher rates of wear (for random write workloads) and will have significantly slower random write speed. An OP of 25-30% is a much better number. Over provisioning is the "extra" space an SSD uses to move data around when new data is written. This is needed because you can only write to flash that is erased, and you can only erase it in (typically) 1MB chunks. So, it is unlikely that all of the data in that 1MB chunk is invalid, so, before you erase it, you have to move the "good" data to another location.

If you notice what other vendors do, they sell a "100GB" SSD with 128GiB of flash on it. "100GB" (100GB = 100 x (10 to the 9th power)) will show up in Windows as "93GB" (Seagate and WD both got sued for this, by the way). This is because "GB" is power of 10, and GiB is power of 2 (which is what Windows erroneously displays for GB).

This means, if a "100GB" (93GB actually) SSD has 128GiB of flash on it, it is ~40% over-provisioned (which really helps write random performance, and reduces wear in random workloads).

These Samsung drives come with a convenient little utility for changing the OP of the drive (which is does by reducing the main partition).

dlseek said:   On a modern SSD such as this, defrag doesn't really do any harm, but it also doesn't really do any good.

The average Windows user doesn't put any significant wear on an SSD, so even if you defragged once a day, every day, this drive would still make it until the 3 year warranty without failing (for flash wear out) with plenty of margin.

One thing to make sure you do if you run these drives is increase the amount of over provisioning - they come with some ridiculously low number, like 8% OP, which will cause the drive to incur significantly higher rates of wear (for random write workloads) and will have significantly slower random write speed. An OP of 25-30% is a much better number. Over provisioning is the "extra" space an SSD uses to move data around when new data is written. This is needed because you can only write to flash that is erased, and you can only erase it in (typically) 1MB chunks. So, it is unlikely that all of the data in that 1MB chunk is invalid, so, before you erase it, you have to move the "good" data to another location.

If you notice what other vendors do, they sell a "100GB" SSD with 128GiB of flash on it. "100GB" (100GB = 100 x (10 to the 9th power)) will show up in Windows as "93GB" (Seagate and WD both got sued for this, by the way). This is because "GB" is power of 10, and GiB is power of 2 (which is what Windows erroneously displays for GB).

This means, if a "100GB" (93GB actually) SSD has 128GiB of flash on it, it is ~40% over-provisioned (which really helps write random performance, and reduces wear in random workloads).

These Samsung drives come with a convenient little utility for changing the OP of the drive (which is does by reducing the main partition).

Yes eaactly. However keep in mind Samsung's OP utility in SSD Magician only works with NTFS partitions. For non-NTFS implementations Samsung does offer an OP adjustment tool for the 830 series but it is only available through their tech support upon request.

This turd gave a bunch of people who thanked the OP negative ratings.

zcm923c0

He's 5 posts up if you want to begin retaliatory strikes. =)

So for price comparison, you should really consider this an 240GB drive?

Another trick is to install a RAMDisk and move your system temp and browser Cache directory. Lots of wasted write cycles there.

dlseek said:   On a modern SSD such as this, defrag doesn't really do any harm, but it also doesn't really do any good.

The average Windows user doesn't put any significant wear on an SSD, so even if you defragged once a day, every day, this drive would still make it until the 3 year warranty without failing (for flash wear out) with plenty of margin.

One thing to make sure you do if you run these drives is increase the amount of over provisioning - they come with some ridiculously low number, like 8% OP, which will cause the drive to incur significantly higher rates of wear (for random write workloads) and will have significantly slower random write speed. An OP of 25-30% is a much better number. Over provisioning is the "extra" space an SSD uses to move data around when new data is written. This is needed because you can only write to flash that is erased, and you can only erase it in (typically) 1MB chunks. So, it is unlikely that all of the data in that 1MB chunk is invalid, so, before you erase it, you have to move the "good" data to another location.

If you notice what other vendors do, they sell a "100GB" SSD with 128GiB of flash on it. "100GB" (100GB = 100 x (10 to the 9th power)) will show up in Windows as "93GB" (Seagate and WD both got sued for this, by the way). This is because "GB" is power of 10, and GiB is power of 2 (which is what Windows erroneously displays for GB).

This means, if a "100GB" (93GB actually) SSD has 128GiB of flash on it, it is ~40% over-provisioned (which really helps write random performance, and reduces wear in random workloads).

These Samsung drives come with a convenient little utility for changing the OP of the drive (which is does by reducing the main partition).

Just configured the SSD as the boot C drive. I have all of my programs on it because all of my files, docs, music etc. is on a NAS server. Holy cow is it fast! I click a program and it opens instantly. Boot up time with about 10 TSR's is 12 seconds. This drive rocks!

I used Acronis Clone to clone the SSD from my C drive. Took about 30 minutes. Changed the boot order in the bios and it worked w/no problems. With an I7, 16 GB of mem, what a difference from my old system. Just need to upgrade video card. Looking at 2x GPU card and a gel cooling system and I'm done.