Samsung 256GB SSD solid-state hard disk

Storage is cheap nowadays, at around £70 per terabyte for hard disks, but Samsung’s 256GB disk costs over £400. This is because it’s a solid-state drive (SSD) that uses similar technology to what is found in USB memory keys and Flash memory cards for cameras. The advantage of such a drive is its speed: it should outperform most hard disks.

This Sata drive uses the 2.5in laptop form factor and has a nice brushed-metal casing, although that’s immaterial once it’s installed inside a PC or laptop. We ran a set of benchmarks on a test rig with the SSD attached, and then ran the same tests again with a 150GB Western Digital Raptor, changing nothing else.

In Sysmark 2007 Preview the difference was not hugely noticeable but the biggest difference was in the PC’s Productivity score, which measures tasks such as photo-editing, that went from 128 to 198. We saw a bigger difference using PCmark05 where the overall score leapt from 5,540 to 8,727, while the productivity score more than doubled from 5,244 to 12,700.

The SSD has an access time of 0.1ms, a lot faster than hard disks, which top out at around 10ms. Consequently its access speeds are excellent ­ it’s nearly 20 times faster than the average hard disk at accessing a random location, because there’s no physical movement involved (or drive head to move).

It’s a multi-level cell (MLC) disk, which is cheaper than single-level (SLC) memory. This means that its lifespan is shorter, but no-one seems to know by how much. Its mean time between failures is an impressive two million hours of use, though that’s an average and, like all components, it could fail much earlier.

In all this is one of the most impressive storage devices we’ve looked at, but it’s only the real gear-heads who’ll get the most out of it. The rest of us are better off waiting a year or so until prices come down to more realistic levels.