Samsung Announces 830 Series SSD, First with SATA 6Gb/s

Add another player to the high-speed, SATA 6 Gb/s SSD game. Today, Samsung unveiled its 830 Series SSD, the flash memory king’s second entry into the consumer solid state drive market, but its first to support the high-speed SATA revision 3 standard that offers up to 6 Gigabits per second. 

Due sometime in October, the 830 Series features Samsung’s proprietary 3-core controller and promises world-class speed and reliability to rival a large cadre of  competitors with drives already on the market. To compete with leading SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs like the OCZ Vertex 3, Intel 510 Series, and Crucial RealSSD C400, the 830 Series also promises a premium brushed-metal design, a suite of bundled utilities, and an optional upgrade kit.

The 830 Series drive will be available in capacities ranging from 64GB to 512GB and in three forms: bare drive, desktop upgrade kit, and notebook upgrade kit. The notebook upgrade kit will come with Norton Ghost software and a USB to SATA cable that enables users to quickly and easily image their old hard drive’s data, OS, and applications onto the new SSD. All versions of the drive come with the Samsung SSD Magician utility that allows users to secure erase, optimize their Windows settings for SSD, and provision more free space for the drive’s garbage collection functions.

Though Samsung has not released target performance numbers for the 830 series, a product manager said that the speeds should be at least as fast as those on the company’s OEM SATA 6Gb/s SSDs which offer over 500 MBps read speeds and over 350 MBps writes. There’s no word on pricing for any of the drive configurations or upgrade kits, but we expect to hear more as we approach the October launch.