Samsung 470 Series SSD (256GB) Upgrade Kit

Samsung's 470 series of SSD (solid state disk) devices have been around for a while but just recently Samsung has brought out an improved installation kit that includes a full copy of Norton Ghost 15, which is extremely useful when it comes to migrating the contents of your old hard disk to the SSD.

As might be expected from a Samsung disk, the 470 SSD uses the company's own components internally. Sixteen 30nm 16GB Nand Flash memory chips provide the storage capacity, with nine chips on one side of the circuit board and the remaining seven on the other side along with the S3C29MAX01-Y340 controller.

To help with performance when it comes to small files, the 470 comes with 256MB of DDR2 (667MHz) cache memory, and it uses a Sata 3gbits/sec interface to connect to the motherboard.

The 470 256GB performed reasonably well although it's no match for the latest Sandforce-controlled disks. It still managed a respectable overall score of 37,430 in Futuremark's PC Mark Vantage HDD benchmarking suite.

In our real-world testing, loading Windows 7 from scratch on to the disk took a mere 380 seconds from the beginning of the install to the splash screen asking for a username, and once installed, the system booted into Windows from a cold boot (from the power button) in 49 seconds.

The big problem with current SSDs is the degradation of their performance over time, something that all SSDs suffer from in one way or another. All the SSD manufacturers are working hard at reducing this drop-off through firmwire updates, software utilities or a combination of both.

The 470 Series supports the TRIM command in Windows 7 (which lets the operating system inform the disk which data blocks are no longer in use so that they can be wiped clean internally). For non-Windows users, Samsung provides its own SSD Magician software which does pretty much the same job.