The Samsung 470 Series Solid State Drive is this company’s first entry into the consumer SSD market. As a producer of many of the components used in other SSDs, as well as providing OEM SSD solutions for various computer manufacturers, we were surprised that they haven’t entered this market earlier, having introduced this drive in November 2010. The Samsung 470 Series SSD comes in three capacities, 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB. What follows is our review of the 256 GB model.
Initial Impression
The 470 Series comes in a clear plastic container, the drive contained in a foam enclosure. The drive itself looks stylish, the top being brushed metal with raised SAMSUNG lettering, and orange plastic in the corner of the drive indicating the capacity. The insert lists several features of the drive, such as Samsung 32 nm MLC NAND Flash Memory, Samsung S1MAX SSD Controller, 470 MB/s Read + Write Speed, and a 2.5 inch form factor with SATA II Interface. The 470 MB/s statement was also in larger lettering, with smaller lettering detailing that this was arrived at by combining a Read speed of 250 MB/s and a Write speed of 220 MB/s, which we think is somewhat misleading.
Samsung 470 Series 256 GB SSD
MLC is Multi Level Cell, which is one type of DRAM used in SSDs, the other being SLC, or Single Level Cell. MLC is typically lower performing, but less expensive, than SLC. The 32 nm is the memory technology used in this drive, and it was state of the art when the drive was introduced. The smaller this number, the more memory can fit in a space. The latest reported technology is a 19 nm process from Toshiba and Sandisk.
When we removed the drive from the packaging, at first we thought we had received a mockup, because the drive was so light compared to what we’re used to with a 2.5 inch drive. Whereas the Hitachi drive we’ll be benchmarking against weighs about 4 ounces, the 470 series weighs in at a mere 2.4 ounces. The bottom of the unit, which has screw holes in standard locations on both the side and bottom of the drive, but appears to be plastic, raised concerns about durability and the possibility of stripping it if you’re a bit too enthusiastic with your screwdriver.
Testing Methodology
This drive was tested in a MacBook Pro (Early 2008) with 6 GB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.7.2, and a Mac mini (Mid 2010) with 8 GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.6.8. Note that the SATA bus on the MacBook Pro is limited to 1.5 Gb/s, or 192 MB/s, whereas the SATA bus on the Mac mini can achieve 3.0 Gb/s, or 384 MB/s. The rotational drive in the MacBook Pro is a Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 and the rotational drive in the Mac mini is a Toshiba MK3255GSXF.
Our first measure of performance is boot time, which is the time from the boot chime (on the Mac mini) or spinning progress wheel (on the MacBook Pro) to the time the desktop is presented, and a drive read activity indicator indicates no activity. This is a good test for how the drive deals with a large number of small files.
Our second measure of performance is the transfer a single large file between the SSD and another drive on the system. On both the MacBook Pro and Mac mini, we transferred files with an Iomega eGO drive connected via FireWire 800.
Our third measure of performance is synthetic benchmark, using Drive Genius 3.1 from Prosoft Engineering. It performs sustained read, sustained write, random read and random write tests, using a block size ranging from 32K to 16M in size. We also enabled TRIM mode on our Lion machine, to see if we could get increased write performance. TRIM is a method of making sure SSD memory cells are clean before they are written to, resulting in maximum throughput.
Benchmarks
For all tests, items in bold are better.
Startup Time (seconds)
| MacBook Pro Rotational | 175 |
| MacBook Pro SSD | 32 |
| Mac mini Rotational | 154 |
| Mac mini SSD | 22 |