Samsung 32GB SSD reviewed

Zitat

Sixteen 2GB chips make up the 32GB SSD, so the cost of making it really stacks up if you think a fast 2GB USB Flash drive is about £20 (inc. VAT), so you’re already looking at £320 in Flash alone. Obviously there are economies of scale for Samsung as it makes the raw Flash and controller chip, but we’re very far out of normal hard drive pricing considering you can buy over fifteen times the capacity for a fifth of the price.

Finally, a Samsung SSD can work in extreme environments, withstanding 1000Gs of gravitational shock, unlike a hard drive which can only take around 70Gs when operational. It can also be used between -25ºC and +85ºC, rather than the more limited +5ºC to 60ºC for a normal hard drive.

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.

For the shy side of £300 it's a huge investment for very little performance gain, unless you have a very small amount of system memory, in which case I suggest you spend a fraction of the cost of an SSD on a memory upgrade instead. A Western Digital Raptor hard drive coupled with enough system memory will offer an overall better, and cheaper experience.

We have seen a Sony VAIO VGN-TZ12VN notebook with an SSD drive in it (review published on Trusted Reviews this Monday 23rd July) and it’s not until you use it do you realise how much hard drives are holding back notebooks: it’s lighter and has a very long battery life for its size, it’s absolutely silent and for a change doesn’t get hot under one palm, but you do still have to suffer the underside being toasty.