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Samsung has been manufacturing memory and SSD-drive storage controllers for years. In recent months the South Korean electronics giant quietly began shipping a branded line of SSD drives for consumer and retail markets that should make resellers sit up and take notice.
Dubbed the 470 Series, Samsung's new 2.5-inch SATA II SSD drives are available in 64-GB, 128-GB and 256-GB models and respectively list for $129, $259, and $519 respectively. Not bad considering that 256-GB drives with similar specs from Corsair and Kingston are selling on the street for at least 30 percent more.
As for specs, the 470 Series is no slouch. All drive models feature Samsung's latest 30-nm multi-level cell (MLC) storage architecture and are rated for read operations to perform at 250 MBps. For write operations, the higher-capacity drives are rated at 220 MBps, and the 64-GB drive is supposed to deliver 170GBps. Your results will vary of course, and in tests performed here at the CRN Test Center, the 256-GB review sample managed a maximum throughput of 83.5 MBps and 21,382 input/output transactions per second (IOPS).
To test the new Samsung drive, we fired up our six-core AMD Phenom-based test fixture, which consists of an AsusTek Crosshair IV Formula motherboard with 4-GB 1333-MHz DDR3 memory in a two-channel configuration running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate N. IOMeter was used to measure transaction processing and data throughput performance using our standard optimization methodology, which gradually increases the number of pending IOs per target until performance falls off. The best performance was seen at the default setting of one IO per target, with sequential reads of 4K chunks of data. As expected, performance fell off as randomness was increased.
