Samsung SSD 830 Series: New SATA 3 Solid State Drives for Consumers

Samsung Electronics just announced its brand new line of internal solid state drives (SSDs) designed for consumer laptops and desktops - the Samsung SSD 830 series, and will be available in October of this year.

For those readers who don't already know about SSDs, these storage drives use flash memory (similar to USB flash drives) for data storage rather than the spinning platters found in conventional hard disk drives. The end result is much faster performance, lower energy consumption, reduced heat output and improved reliability without risk of a hard drive crash ... at least that's the goal.

These new Samsung SSDs feature the high-speed Serial ATA Revision 3.0 interface, which doubles the data bandwidth of Samsung’s previous SSD product, the SSD 470 series. We previously reviewed the Samsung SSD 470 and we were pretty impressed by the performance of that little drive, so we're eager to find out just how fast the new 830 will be. The 830's new feature set should significantly improve performance, making these SSDs an ideal upgrade for current notebook users who don't want to buy a whole new PC.

The Samsung SSD 830 series has a rather unique exterior with a brushed metal enclosure and an orange accent in the corner that identifies the drives as Samsung. Samsung claims to be the only SSD manufacturer that currently engineers all of its components in-house, allowing the company to maintain strict standards over hardware and software for superior reliability. In addition, Samsung SSDs come with the Samsung Magician software which fine tunes the SSD to keep it running at peak performance.

Samsung's full upgrade package makes it easy and safe to upgrade your old laptop hard drive. The included Norton Ghost software transfers your full Windows installation to the new SSD and eliminates the need to reinstall applications, manually move data, and reconfigure user settings. Notebook upgrade kits include a USB to SATA adapter cable. The desktop bundle includes a bracket for installing the 2.5" drive in a 3.5" bay, all required cables, and detailed instructions.

The Samsung SSD 830 series will be available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Detailed features will be disclosed at the official launch, which is scheduled for October.