Review: Samsung 32GB Flash Solid State Drive

A fast, silent and lightweight glimpse of the future

The price of Flash memory is in free fall, with sub-£10 2GB SD cards now readily available.

Although the benefits of Flash memory are many, it's taken Samsung to show us just how good the stuff really is.

Samsung's been talking about Nand Flash memory-based Solid State Drives (SSD) for some time now, and we've got our hands on the biggest such Flash drive so far.

It's a 32GB drive in a notebook 2.5in form factor. Parallel ATA is used instead of the latest Serial ATA and, as such, it will fit into any Parallel ATA hard disk chassis.

Mechanical hard disks use platters that spin at high speeds with magnetic heads whizzing across them to read and write data. Samsung does away with this and relies on seemingly dormant chips. As such, it's completely silent.

It's also lightweight – at 54g, it weighs half as much as a typical 2.5in drive.

In testing, the 32GB SSD proved an outstanding performer. In PCmark05's HD benchmark, it scored 6,306. This makes it the fastest 2.5in hard disk we've ever tested, blowing away the previous top dog, a 7,200rpm Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 with a score of 4,176, into second place.

These scores are on a par with the best 7,200rpm desktop hard disks, and almost as good as high-end 10,000rpm Raptor drives.

Such a high score can be put down to low access times: the Samsung took just 0.2ms to respond in our tests, compared with 15ms for the Travelstar 7K100.

The only dent in the Samsung's performance is for bigger file transfers, where data is read in order and access time becomes less relevant. In these situations it posted similar average transfer times as the Travelstar 7K100. A full list of our results can be found on our benchmarking website.

It was in real-world testing that the 32GB SSD shone. Using an uncluttered hard disk with Windows XP installed, along with 13GB of data, the Travelstar 7K100 booted into Windows XP in 41 seconds.

Using Samsung's disk, with an identical data arrangement, the start-up time was slashed to 31 seconds. We were using a recently formatted disk, and the gap between Flash and mechanical hard disk boot up times will only widen over time; unlike conventional disks, SSDs aren't affected by fragmentation and won't flinch in the face of cluttered and fragmented data.

In games testing, we found no discernible difference in actually playing performance. However, although there were no more frames per second to be had with the SSD, start-up times were a different matter.

Using Counter-Strike Source (CS:S), part of the Half-Life 2 package which is notorious for long load times, the CS:S benchmark took 28 seconds to load on the 7,200rpm Travelstar, but only 13 seconds on the SSD.

Power consumption is also much less for the Samsung SSD at 0.1W and 1W for idle and active modes respectively, compared with 0.85W and 2.3W for the Travelstar.

Samsung also says it is more durable than mechanical hard disks, quoting the vibrations it can take as 1500G, which is higher than Hitachi's 300G rating.

The company also quotes the mean time to failure for the 32GB SSD at 114 years, much longer than the 5 years most hard disk manufacturers state.

Before you get too excited, the Samsung 32GB Flash SSD isn't actually on sale yet in the UK and there are no guarantees that it will ever come to these shores. In Germany the drive retails at €649 (£442) on Amazon, making it far more expensive than anything else out there.

Samsung is persisting with solid state hard drives though, and a 64GB version is due to go on sale in the next three months.

Samsung claims read speeds will be 20 per cent faster, while write speeds will be 60 per cent faster than the 32GB version. Hybrid drives, where mechanical and Flash-based data storage is used, are also beginning to emerge.

32GB isn't a lot of storage by today's standards, but we found it was ideal for installing Windows and programs onto, leaving a large external hard disk to handle the files it copes best with, for example large video, music and picture files.

With the 32GB Flash SDD performing so well in day-to-day laptop use, the technology looks set to replace mechanical hard disks sooner rather than later.