Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD Review

Name: Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD Review - Page 3
Brand: Samsung

by Paul Lilly — Thursday, December 09, 2010, 11:55 AM EDT

Test System and HD Tune Pro

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. And all drives were secure erased prior to the start of any testing. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Hard Drives -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7 930

Asus P6X58D Premium (X58 Express Chipset)

ATI Radeon HD 5850

6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333
CAS 7

Integrated on board

Corsair Nova Series V128 128GB
Intel X-25M Gen2 80GB
Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB
OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Samsung 470 Series 256GB

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Professional
Intel 9.1.1.1020 w/ Matrix Storage
DirectX 11

AMD Catalyst 10.10

Benchmarks Used:
HD Tune Pro
HD Tach v3.0.1.0
ATTO v2.46
CrystalDiskMark v3
PCMark Vantage
SiSoftware Sandra 2010 SP1

We decided to pit the Samsung 470 drive against the Corsair Nova Series V128 (Indilinx), Intel X25-M (Intel), and OCZ Vertex 2 (SandForce) in order to see how Samsung's own custom controller fares against today's most popular SSD chipsets.

HD Tune Pro

I/O Subsystem Measurement

The latest version of HD Tune Pro (v4.60) offers improved support for SSDs and we use it here to test both read and write performance broken up into minimum transfer rate, maximum transfer rate, average transfer rate, access time, burst rate, and CPU usage. What this does is a paint an overall picture of performance rather than zero in on just the average score. By doing so, we can see which drives might suffer from a stuttering problem or otherwise run inconsistently..

As far as HD Tune Pro is concerned, Samsung has clearly put together a formidable controller that's more than capable of holding its own next to the competition. The Samsung SSD turned in the second highest average read speed punctuated by the highest minimum transfer rate. The two DRAM chips are clearly paying dividends here, as less than 5MB/s separate Samsung's lowest and highest read rates.

There's a little bit of a bigger gap between minimum and maximum transfers when it came to writes, though still not much. And once again, Samsung didn't turn in the highest average transfer rate, but it did come awfully close and trounced the competition in minimum transfers. What this all means is that over the long haul, the Samsung drive should, in theory, perform more consistently no matter what the task.