Customer Reviews

SAMSUNG 830 Series 2.5-Inch 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7PC128B/WW

5 star:		(136)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I installed this as my main system drive on my Macbook Pro. It works fine out-of-the-box and everything loads much faster. A complete restart takes under a minute easily, and that's with all kinds of peripherals attached (hard drives, monitors, printers, etc). I can launch Safari in seconds and everything is just much snappier. I moved all of my larger media files (music, photos, videos) to a 2nd hard disc that now lives in the superdrive bay.

There is one big caveat: if you install this on a decent older computer, you'll have a really hard time justifying a new computer. I was in the market for one of those fancy new Macbook Pros w/ Retina display, but after installing this I'm good to go for a couple more years at least. Granted, I'm no power-user by any stretch of the imagination.

I will update this review after the SSD gets some hours on it. If you see no updates, you can assume everything is peachy.

I have got to say. This little ssd is a breast. There are others that may be faster, but for the money and value in my opinion it does not get any better. It is especially easy to install the firmware and Trim support for Windows 7. This keep your ssd running in tip top shape, and for those of who like speed consider this an option. I have had other ssd's such as OCZ, Kingston, and Corsair where you normally have to go into the bios to perform firmware upgrades. This process is tedious and quite annoying. In other cases, tuning your computer for trim is also a hassle. Samsung has streamlined this process and made it simple.

It took me some days to think about buying a SSD. I read a lot of review, comments and decided to go with Samsung 830 series.
The first impression is it is light and slim. It's slimmer than normal 2.5 inch HDD. The process to upgrade is pretty straight forward. Here are the steps that I did:

1. Connect the SSD to MBP via usb cable then create an ext2 partition.
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the entire Mac partition to the SSD.
3. I also have a bootcamp partition that running windows 7, so I use WinClone to create an image for bootcamp partition.
4. Turn off and replace the hard disk. Turn on and It only takes about 15s to boot up.
5. Everything work fine except the TRIM is not supported (TRIM is only supported for Apple SSD), so search google for how to enable the TRIM feature for Mac OS X. It brings you about 10% to 15% performance.
6. Create a windows partition (FAT) and use WinClone again to copy the bootcamp partition from the image to disk.
7. Enjoy the speed.

This SSD is absolutely amazing! I thought my WD VelociRaptor was an improvement over ordinary HDDs, but this Samsung is light years faster. I'm not a big gamer, but my TrainSim 2012 on Steam used to take upwards of five minutes to load and run, now it takes a bit more than 30 seconds! Happiness!

On the downside, though, Samsung tech support is absolutely the worst I've ever experienced. As with other reviewers here, I haven't been able to get the included Magician software to run. It starts, then abends with an error log. The most frustrating part of dealing with Samsung tech support is there is zero capability of having a continuing dialog as tech support digs deeper by asking new questions or suggesting new diagnostics for me to perform. Every single response I make has to be started over as though it was a brand-new ticket, which is unacceptable. It's bad enough to get a different tech for every submission, but there's no thread/history to help the tech.

If you don't need Samsung tech support, then by all means purchase this SSD. It's AMAZING!

Before this drive, I was experiencing 90-120 second startup times and 30-45 second shutdown times (I have a few servers running). Parallels would resume Windows 7 in about 90 seconds.

Now, startups (from clicking the button to login screen) are 25 seconds (13 of which the screen hasn't even turned on yet--the SSD can't speed that up). Tack on 2-4 seconds for logging in and starting my servers, etc. Shutdowns occur in around 10 seconds now, mostly because Crashplan slows things down a bit. Parallels resumes Windows 7 in 7 seconds flat and shuts down in 2-3. Not too shabby.

Here are the steps I followed to install this beast:

Plug SSD into PC to check for latest firmware. Update if necessary. (Mine came with the latest)
Unmount drive then disconnect cables
Put SSD in external eSATA/USB enclosure and plug into Mac
Format with Disk utility as a single "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" partition
Get Carbon Copy Cloner (Free) and open it
In Preferences, ensure first check box (Auto create archive of Lion's Recovery HD volume) is checked
Select Source: Old Macintosh HD
Select all files on the drive
Select Destination: New Macintosh SSD
Click Clone
It should walk you through extracting Lion's Recovery Partition. Just follow the steps
If, for some reason, the clone stops mid-way through, just start it back up again and it should continue where it left off.
Once complete, swap the drives and reboot. You'll need a really small philips head screwdriver and torx driver.

Note: Upon starting up with the new drive, Little Snitch and a couple other random programs on my computer seemed to have lost some of its preferences.

Good luck, and hope this helps someone!

I was building a new high end computer and decided to get an SSD as my boot drive. This was one of the cheapest 128GB I could find. I really like Samsung products, read good reviews about it, and decided to buy it. In a desktop though, you need to get an adapter. I decided to go with the SILVERSTONE SDP08 3.5 to 2 X 2.5-Inch Bay Converter. Everything fits like a glove, and my Windows 7 Experience Index rates this drive a perfect 7.9. You should install the Samsung SSD Magic and run the optimization though. Without running that, my index was around 5.9. it only takes a few minutes. Very happy with this product.

I struggled mightily with trying to find the right SATA III SSD for my 2011 Macbook Pro 17". I first bought the OCZ Vertex 4. Unfortunately, the device is not even recognized by Mac OS Disk Utility. After spending hours researching the problem and trying to upgrade the firmware (no mac upgrade tool) I decided to return the unit and try my luck with a different highly rated SSD.

I then bought the Crucial M4. This device was actually recognized and the OS installed -- but I had the constant beach balls and eventually the computer would no longer startup. Crucial support web site actually suggested that I downgrade the Firmware to make it work with the Macbook Pro!!

As a last ditch effort I ordered the Samsung 830 and I can tell you that it has been great. The device has been working amazingly well out of the box and my computer is very very fast.

If you have a Macbook Pro avoid the headaches and just buy a Samsung 830. It works perfectly out of the box.

We have purchased in the neighborhood of 50 of these drives over the past 6 months and had nothing but good things regarding their performance and reliability. Makes a huge difference when replacing older 5400 2.5in. drives in our older Dell Latitude D630 laptops. It makes the older laptops perform even better than they did when they were new.

We struggled for quite some time with OCZ drives, with at least 1 out of every 10 going bad, but have had great luck with these little Samsung drives.

I bought this to use in a new gaming desktop. This drive offers insanely fast loading times compared to my 7200RPM Hard disk on SATA III. They're extremely durable as well, not to mention completely silent. If you want to use it in a desktop, know that it's a 2.5" drive, so you'll either need to get a drive bay adapter, or a computer case that has 2.5-inch drive slots. It should fit fine in most laptops. Most people will think solid-state storage is too expensive for not enough of a performance increase. That's until you've actually tried it. Using an SSD will improve your loading and startup/shutdown times way more than any ultra-advanced CPU could ever dream of. I've used it for a good week now, and I never want my desktop to have an old hard disk as the primary storage ever again.

It's easy to set up, at least on ASUS motherboards- Just make sure you set the SATA mode to AHCI in your BIOS settings BEFORE installing Windows or you won't get the speeds you could. Other than that, there was no firmware update necessary, and it worked great. Google Chrome opens instantaneously- By the time I lift my finger off the mouse to click the icon, it's already open. Microsoft Office apps open in less than a second. If it's speed you're after, this is definitely worth the price, even if they're more expensive than traditional HDD's. In the Windows Experience Index, one of these drives scores a 7.9 (Highest score possible in Windows 7).

If you're worried about space, do what I did and use this SSD for your operating system and software, then add a traditional high-capacity HDD as a second drive for your pictures, music, games, movies, etc. They'll still load fast, since the HDD wouldn't be loading the OS as well.

I wanted to speed up my 2011 MacBook Pro with an SSD drive. Got this bare drive at a reasonable price. I ordered a separate universal cable kit to attach the drive to my MBP via USB for cloning the original drive. After formatting with the Mac Disk Utility, I Used Carbon Copy Clone, cloned the original drive over to the SSD. Then booted up the MBP on the USB attached SSD to verify it functioned OK (Power up+Option key).

Next step was to open the MBP, remove the original drive and DVD drive. I had purchased a HHD caddy on Amazon that fit the original 500GB drive and that kit moved it perfectly to the DVD spot. Then installed the SSD where the HHD was. Put the back cover on and turned on the MBP. Now I needed to go into Setup and point the new SSD as the boot disk under Startup. Rebooted and it came up fine on the SSD. Then downloaded Trim Enabler app and executed it and with a reboot and Trim is now enabled under the System Info. I also had to go into disk info and allow R+W on the users for both drives.

Now the good part. The machine boots in less than 10 seconds. Word or XL will launch in under a second. Photoshop CS5 launches in 2 seconds! Black Magic speed tests the write speed at 400Mbps and read speed at over 500Mbps (actually pegs the meter) while the old 500GB original drive speed tests at a barely 70Mbps read and write.

Now the bad part: my iMac seems dirt slow compared to my MBP!