Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD Review

In some ways, Samsung is a silicon ninja in the solid state drive (SSD) space. How so you ask?  While most of the competition is all too happy to blitz the SSD market amid much fanfare and ballyhooing, Samsung just quietly does its thing and usually flies under the radar a bit. Whether you realize it or not, Samsung has been churning out their own SSDs for some time (as well as the actual NAND Flash chips themselves of course), only up until now they've come pre-packaged with OEM notebooks or rebadged under another company's branding. With the introduction of the new 470 series, Samsung is finally selling its own branded SSDs, but that's not all. Pop the hood and you'll find the Samsung label through and through, from the memory chips to the custom controller -- no Indilinx or SandForce hardware here, folks.

Though branding an entire SSD line the "470 series" may come off as a bit, well, boring, there's a reason why Samsung chose that designation. It represents the total rated throughput, including "industry leading performance of up to 250MB/s sequential read speed and 220MB/s sequential write speed." Add the two together and you arrive at 470. Kind of nifty, eh? It's also fairly respectable, though certainly not the fastest rated SSD we've seen. Take a peek at the full feature-set and specifications below and then click through to see how the 470 in its 256GB form compares against the competition.

Samsung 470 Series 256GB SATA II SSD Specifications & Features

Maximum sequential read speed up to 250MB/s Maximum sequential write speed up to 220MB/s Samsung controller (ARM technology) Samsung NAND Flash memory with two 128MB DDR2-667 modules to reduce/eliminate stuttering TRIM support (O/S dependent) Up to 31,000 IOPS (random read) Up to 21,000 IIOPS (random write) 9.5 x 69.85 x 100 (mm)

SATA 3.0Gpbs Native Command Queuing (NCQ) MTBF: 1.5 million hours Active power use: 0.24W Idle power use: 0.14W Warranty: 3 years Shock Resistance: 1,500G (@ 0.5msec half sine wave) O/S Support: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / Mac OS / Linux

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Samsung's 470 series is available at the following capacities and price points:

• Samsung 470 Series 256GB: $550
• Samsung 470 Series 128GB: $280
• Samsung 470 Series 64GB: $140

The specs are mostly the same for each model, save for the 64GB version. Interestingly enough, the 64GB variant checks in with up to 170MB/s write and up to 250MB/s read speeds, which doesn't add up to 470 like the other two. However, it does flesh out the new lineup with a lower capacity drive for those looking to inject their system with an ultra fast boot drive for not a lot of coin.

We'll be examining Samsung's flagship capacity, the 256GB, on the following pages, which of course is the most expensive of the bunch. At $550, this isn't a budget upgrade by any means, but it is roughly in line with similarly spec'd drives from the competition, underscoring just how far SSDs have yet to go in the price-per-gigabyte department.