Samsung 830 Series Overview
The Samsung 830 Series has to be one of the best looking solid state drives that I have seen. It has a very nice brushed aluminum casing with the Samsung logo in the center. There is an orange accent in the corner with the capacity on it, ours being 128GB.
The first thing that really caught my attention when I took the drive out of its box was how thin it was. The 830 Series drive is only 7mm thin! It has to be the thinnest 2.5-inch solid state drive we have reviewed. The reason it is so thin is so it can fit in the ultra-thin laptops out there. Check out the photo below showing it compared to the OCZ Synapse Cache solid state drive.
On the back of the drive is a sticker that has all of the part numbers and information about the drive. On the end of the drive you do have your typical SATA data and SATA power connections.
Normally this is the part where we would open the drive up, but Samsung has made that very hard to do. There are no screws or bolts holding the drive together, rather Samsung uses clips on the inside of the drive so once you put the top cover on you cannot open the drive unless you break those clips. So instead of showing you the inside of the drive lets talk about the components.
Unlike many other current solid state drives the 830 Series uses Samsung’s own 3-core ARM based processor rather than one from SandForce or Indilinx. This controller does make use of a cache chip and it is in the form of a single 256MB Samsung DDR2 DRAM chip. The NAND storage chips are also made by Samsung and are their 20nm DDR toggle chips. Interestly enough there are only four NAND chips for the total 128GB, so they are 32GB each.
