Samsung 64GB

Posted 11/16/08 at 04:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Samsung’s 2.5-inch SSD packs 64 gigabytes of storage into an above-average package. Granted, the SLC-based drive delivers sustained read transfer rates that are slower than those of nearly all the SSDs reviewed here. But the drive makes up for this inadequacy by posting write speeds that match those of the fastest SLC-based drives in this roundup.

Our real-world experience with the drive followed suit. The Samsung SSD turned in a Premiere time of 8:43, nearly 2 minutes slower than Memoright’s GT-series 64GB SSD, but a mere 10 to 20 seconds behind the rest of the non-MLC drives we tested. The Samsung’s PCMark Vantage scores were within 4 percent of Memoright’s SSD, even though the latter crushes theSamsung by nearly 6 milliseconds in its random access write measurement.

While there are certainly some high points in the Samsung’s benchmark scores, the drive’s overall performance was just slightly better than average. But given that most other SSDs we’ve tested offer less than a 10 percent performance improvement yet cost $500 more than Samsung’s SSD, we tip our hat to this drive’s excellent cost-to-speed ratio.