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First tests: Fast 32GB flash hard drive
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Are you ready for laptop storage with no moving parts to spin up, break, drain your battery, add weight, or make noise? That's what you get with Samsung's new 32GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Built using NAND flash memory, the SSD is the first consumer unit with enough capacity to compete against standard notebook drives; 32GB may not satisfy multimedia addicts, but it's plenty for average business users.
We looked at a preproduction model to see how it fared against 5400-rpm Seagate drives using the latest perpendicular recording technology or traditional longitudinal recording. The SSD found files more than twice as fast, and accelerated boot-up. Its cumulative speed advantage over the other two drives was an impressive 25 percent, though it was slower on two tests that involved accessing the drive many times rather than performing longer sequential reads and writes.
Samsung SSD shows its performance edge
Samsung's SSD provides a faster boot time and speeds file search, large-file processing.
| Drive | Drive technology | Test Completion Time (Seconds) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boot up | Copy files & folders | Copy large file | Find file | ACDSee PowerPack 5.01 | Ahead Nero Express 61 | ||
| Samsung 32GB SSD (32GB) | Solid-state | 35 | 267 | 196 | 58 | 710 | 425 |
| Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (160GB) 2 | Perpendicular recording | 42 | 270 | 215 | 131 | 647 | 607 |
| Seagate Momentus 5400.2 (120GB) 2 | Longitudinal recording | 43 | 286 | 223 | 137 | 659 | 638 |
