Test Setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 256MB/512MB/2GB DDR2 (running in dual channel 4-4-4-12 timings), Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, 700W OCZ GameXStream PSU, Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit, Nvidia Forceware 158.24 WHQL.

We compared the SSD to a normal 7200RPM consumer hard drive and an enterprise 10,000RPM hard drive, to see how they all faired in a variety of situations like OS load times, game save load times and general productivity.

It’s been a while since notebooks have used PATA hard drives so we couldn’t test the effect on battery life, and unfortunately we were also only given one so no RAID arrays I’m afraid. Hopefully we can twist Samsung's arm when future SATA products are available...

NB: The Samsung 2.5" SSD is designed for a notebook and mobile solutions, rather then specifically for desktop use. As enthusiasts we are investigating how it might compare to other drives you might use, should you want to aim for a quiet, lower energy but powerful system.




In the low memory situation the OS needs to access the pagefile more which means the speed of random access and general hard drive performance is measured. In this case the SSD seems to excel itself with a boot time virtually no different between the 256MB or 2GB memory use. In comparison the Western Digital 10,000RPM drive doubles the boot time with the memory drop and the Seagate 7200RPM drive is nearly 2.7 times slower.

However, the cost of replacing your 256MB stick with 2GB of memory is far less than an SSD drive. For the same money as an SSD, you could buy 8GB of memory and still have change left over.



The read speed might not quite match a normal hard drive but the random access is typical of an SSD, so offset the 1.3 times read performance improvement the Western Digital 10,000RPM drive against the 15.4 times slower random access and depending on the situation the SSD can come out faster.


Here we have a very strange result because flash is meant to provide a far greater I/O rate then any hard drive. It could be interface limited, where moving to a dedicated SATA connection might provide a better result but is it going to triple its output?