Although a seemingly diverse array of SATA 6Gb/s SSDs have launched in recent months, virtually all of them are powered by the Marvell 88SS9174 or SandForce SF-2200 controllers. The former made its debut with the Crucial RealSSD C300 and has survived longer than anticipated, surfacing again in Crucial's m4 series. Intel also adopted it for its latest-generation products. Between those two drives, we favor the m4, merely it'southward far from today's tiptop contender.

SandForce's second-generation controller got off to a rocky commencement. OCZ's Vertex 3 stormed out of the gates in April, seizing control of our functioning graphs. Despite an impressive showing, early adopters reported many glaring bugs with SF-2200-based drives. Those claims sent OCZ and other articles scrambling to release a series of firmware updates.

Fortunately, most of the major kinks seem to take been ironed out at present and that's given even more vendors, such as Patriot and Kingston, the confidence to launch SandForce-flavored SSDs. Despite an increasingly saturated market place, OCZ has maintained a stiff grip on the competition every bit information technology still offers the best performance versus price ratio of whatsoever SF-2200 SSD.

Through that whole fiasco, a third competitor has been quietly lurking in the shadows: Samsung. Post-obit the success of its 470 Series, the company announced its new 830 Series wink drives earlier this yr. At the time, little was mentioned virtually the drive except that it would utilize the company'south in-house hardware and software, much like the 470 Series.

As a maker of memory and logic controllers, Samsung has been present in the SSD (OEM) market for years, but information technology wasn't until the 470 Series that the company earned a seat in the limelight. With footling hype, the 470 Series quietly slipped nether the radar, simply to snipe the Crucial RealSSD C300 and Vertex 2 in many of our tests last year. The drive was impressive enough to deserve our "Outstanding" accolade and so far it's proven itself in the reliability section.

Unsurprisingly, Samsung's latest offering embraces the SATA 6Gb/s interface, touting 520MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes. The 830 Series carries a Samsung-crafted controller and retention, and it will be sold exclusively under the Samsung brand name. Because the company'south delayed entry, we promise information technology'due south had enough of time to appraise and annihilate the competition. Will we see a repeat of concluding twelvemonth's impressive sit-in? There'southward only one manner to find out…