Samsung ready to drop faster SSDs Samsung will have a new SSD out next month. The 840 Series is a notebook-ready 6Gbps Sata drive, with a high performance - Samsung claims - Pro line accompanied by a lesser, cheaper vanilla offering. The Korean giant claimed the 840 Pro "provides 100,000 IOPS for random read and 90,000 IOPS for random write, making it three …
In my experience this doesn't help much. I have a 128GB Samsung in my Desktop and my user home on a 1TB Seagate, booting the system is fast, but I don't boot it that often and waking it from hibernation is not much faster. Programs like lightroom don't start that much faster because they have to read their database from the harddisk, Same for visual studio and such.
In my Notebook I have a OCZ Vertex 4 with 256GB as a single drive, there I see a huge difference, even with Sata-2 since it's a bit older :)
So the next step is putting another and bigger SSD into my desktop and doing some filesystem balancing magic with links and mountpoints to get some sort of hierarchical storage for my needs.
Honestly, 32GB isn't enough for a boot drive for any modern OS and application workload.
64GB at an absolute pinch, but in my opinion, 120GB minimum, 256GB preferable.
There's the Samsung 830 available at 150 quid with 20 quid cashback on Dabs right now, and that would be my recommendation over any other drive by far.
I put a 256 830 series in a late 2009 13" macbook pro the other week and I needed no proprietary connectors. It took longer to undo al the tiny baseplate screws on the machine itself than it did to disconnect the SATA connector to the motherboard, remove the HDD caddy chasis and mount screws, reattach them to the 830 drive, plug it in and put it in the machine.
Might just be my machine but I can honestly say it was a quicker and easier job than the same task carried out on an HP and Toshiba laptop the previous week.
Good to hear there's improvement in that area. I had a good bit of trouble on a 2006 13" Macbook removing screws that look like this: http://apple4less.com/ebay/images/mbhdtray-2.jpg. Had to grab them with pliers to turn them and thus screw them off since none of my screwdrivers fit.
I felt somewhat bitter about the experience, presuming (perhaps wrongly) they were purposely made so they would only be easily removable by some £1,500 Apple screwdriver.
The first thing I did when I worked out the article was about a new gen of their SSDs was to go to DABs and check out the 830 pricing. The 256GB drives are at about the same price they've been since May, mid £120+VAT, but I'd been hoping the 512GB drives had dropped :-(
Damn
nope they've not
Damn again.
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