There were 5 people from the Samsung team who had come all the way from South Korea to present to us the Samsung SSD 830 series and I can certainly see why Barcelona was picked. Within the team were two engineers and two senior managers from their SSD division. Jonathan Da Silva is the global strategist and was kind enough to share a few words with us and answer some of the questions our readers had. Unfortunately, my voice recorder wasn’t the best of quality so I’ll aim to paraphrase his response.


How do you see pricing of SSDs changing in the future, are we likely to see prices staying the same and performance increasing, or performance staying the same and prices decreasing?

A lot of that depends on the NAND and the macro trend would be dependent on NAND prices and development in the future.

We have seen various reports saying that moving to smaller NAND fabrication can have problems such as fewer available erase cycles and thus an impact on endurance. What steps are Samsung taking to reduce this effect?

Samsung use higher technologies that have high yields. Since Samsung themselves manufacture NAND flash memory, they know the technology well and can figure out whether smaller fabrication processes are reliable or not. When transitioning to smaller technologies, Samsung will normally sell to the OEM market first which makes up 80-90% of their business and based on feedback of the quality there will move to the consumer market so end-user at home can expect a thoroughly tested and proven unit. This is partly why Samsung have come to the market slightly later than their competitors but at least quality is ensured.

What do you plan on competing with more established competitors like SandForce?

Samsung believes that the results will speak for themselves. Although SandForce has been fantastic and their growth shows this, they remain a third-party that other manufacturers rely on. It comes down to the NAND. Samsung have access to NAND and can move to the next node whereas other companies still have to rely on a couple of different NAND manufacturers such as Micron and others before releasing new products.

From a more technological perspective, what do Samsung think of compression?

Samsung drives don’t support compression. The reason for this is that most day to day data are already compressed such as MP3 and videos so Samsung would rather ensure good performance across the board rather than high performance for certain types of files.

Would Samsung ever consider a third party controller?

Strategically no, Samsung believe in the long run that building their own controller, figuring out how to use the NAND, moving development together and making people cooperate would be smarter.

Are you considering moving to the 3.5 inch form factor for larger capacity?

Samsung have no plans for that. The aim is for smaller form factors and not necessarily large capacities. The real demand for a 1TB drive is low and not many people would be willing to get one.

Would Samsung look at making a diverse range of products in the consumer market?

Samsung are currently discussing the possibility of doing so. The questions they ask themselves are how do they band their categories and how would they tailor their products more to what their consumers need? In terms of priorities, would they target niche applications or make something that caters to general usage? The problem when we look at sales in the US is that they are very complicated for companies that provide up to 10 different SKUs. Samsung are more interested in optimising their products for reliability and performance so that users know exactly what they are going to get and as such would rather focus on just a few SKUs.

With different companies marketing their products using different techniques to show different rated speeds, how do Samsung aim to market their products?

The problem is that different manufacturers use different techniques to test their SSDs using as ATTO, Iometer etc. but the event is part of how Samsung aims to market their products. Samsung realise that their sequential speeds might not match that of its competitors but they aim to be competitive and most importantly provide sustained performance rather than simply marketing peak performance. If consumers look at peak speeds as a metric, Samsung are still very good but when it comes to the real experience, this is where Samsung will stand out.

Do Samsung plan on releasing a hybrid mechanical/SSD like what some of your competitors have done?

Samsung sold their HDD division to Seagate since they were unable to compete with other manufacturers and take the number 1 position. So there are no plans to build mechanical/SSD hybrids.

And what about PCIe based SSDs?

This is something Samsung are not sure about as it depends on demand, especially by the OEMs. Generally, development is based on the OEM market first and then shifts to consumers.


I hope this short interview has answered many of the questions you might have had about Samsung SSDs and for the full review, please have a look at our in-depth article: Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD Review.

We would like to thanks SAMSUNG once again for this unique opportunity.