Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD Royal Oak MI

Although the price of the SLC NAND flash-based Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD has come down in recent months, at £219, its price per gigabyte is still nearly triple that of many of the MLC NAND flash drives.




However, as this drive doesn't have the stroppy JMicron memory controller, the claimed read speed of 100MB/sec and write speed of 80MB/sec should be achievable.







HD Tach 3 RW revealed that the Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD has an average read speed of 95.5MB/sec, only 4.5MB/sec slower than the 100MB/sec claimed speed. Meanwhile, its average write speed of 73.7MB/sec is only 6.3MB/sec slower than the 80MB/sec speed that Samsung claims it's capable of delivering. As a result, despite having a much slower read speed than MLC drives such as the Patriot 128GB Warp, the Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD scored higher in both Media Benchmark tests. In the GIMP image editing test, the Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD scored 1,376 compared to the Patriot 128GB Warp's 1,360, while in the multitasking test it managed 1,125, with the Patriot just behind with a score of 1,124.







It performed similarly to most of the other flash drives when loading Crysis, taking 23 seconds on the first run and 17 seconds on the next. The only other drives in the Labs test that were noticeably quicker were the Intel flash drives and ACARD RAM drives. The Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD also kept up with the faster drives in the search test, taking just 13 seconds. Both flash drives from Patriot were slower despite having much faster read speeds. The test system only drew 142W from the wall, the second-lowest power draw.







Although SLC-based drives tend to have slower read speeds than their MLC counterparts, their write speeds are more akin to those of 3.5in hard drives. With a lower price and faster read speed, the Samsung 32GB SATA II SSD would be an awesome SSD, especially for laptops.

Author: James Gorbold & Antony Leather

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