Samsung 830 Series 256 GB SSD Review

Conclusions

We can see from our performance tests that the Samsung 830 Series exhibits a better level of performance than the Crucial M4 in almost every test.

In most of the tests, it would be fair to say that the Crucial M4 doesn’t lag behind the 830 Series by a massive margin, though. We highly doubt that the real world performance of the two drives would differ much, especially if you’re used to the speeds of a conventional hard drive.

We were very impressed by the incompressible data performance of both the Samsung 830 Series and Crucial M4 as the results were very similar to those achieved in the compressible data tests. This can be attributed to the controllers used in each drive. They don’t use compression technology to speed up read and write speeds like the SandForce SF-2281, which is used in a vast number of drives on the market.

This means that the drives will offer mor
e consistent performance with different types of data as SandForce-based drives experience much worse performance when dealing with incompressible data.

Considering that the Samsung 830 Series 256 GB costs only USD 10 more than the Crucial M4, we would recommend it over the Crucial M4. We feel that it offers a good compromise between performance and value.

However, we would consider purchasing the Crucial M4 256 GB instead if it were to fall to around USD 190, as it would be perfect as a cost effective SSD for budget-minded users at this price.