I've finally managed to run some comparison tests on a laptop before and after upgrading its hard disk to a Samsung 32GB Flash solid state disk (SSD), as mentioned in this blog a couple of weeks ago.

The good news is that the Flash disk appears to deliver on Samsung's promises, both improving performance and extending battery life.

With the Flash drive fitted, the test laptop increased its Business Winstone 2004 benchmark score from 3.3 to 3.8, an improvement of 15 percent just by replacing the hard disk. It should be noted that Winstone measures application performance, not just disk read and write speeds.

Turning to battery life, the laptop lasted for three hours and 51 minutes with its original hard disk, but managed four hours and 27 minutes – at least half an hour longer - with the Flash disk fitted.

Of course, my test unit is a somewhat old laptop, but hard drives are still the bottleneck in most PCs, and anything that boosts performance and gives extra battery life is surely welcome – providing you can justify the price tag, and upgrading isn't too tricky.

A full report will be published in a future issue of IT Week.

21 Jun 2007