Hardware Geeks

So I recently tested out a Lenovo Thinkpad with a Samsung SSD drive to see how it handled. I have heard great things about SSD and I have had quick demos from Kingston, Samsung and Toshiba on their SSD drives but never really had any hands on experience with one.

So when Samsung offered to loan me a ThinkPad I immediately said “YES”, I mean who wouldn’t jump at the chance to test out a laptop and it’s SSD drive? But I didn’t have a ThinkPad that had a traditional platter harddrive to compare it against. That was until I borrowed one from a friend who recently purchased one.

One of the benefits of having an SSD drive is that they are much faster than traditional platter harddrives and since I had two think pads both running windows Vista business 32 bit and both with the same default programs Lenovo installs on the notebooks I fired them up and timed them.

The system with the SSD drive loaded 35.3 seconds faster than the one with the traditional platter drive.

I then installed a video game on both systems (Lego Batman), and after they were installed I started the game up, again the SSD system loaded the game faster than the non SSD system. Microsoft Office loaded faster, web sites loaded faster everything was faster. I literally need not wait for anything to load with the SSD drive. I was able to do so much more on the system with the SSD drive than with the platter drive. So my conclusion is; yes SSD drives are faster...but that’s a given and you probably knew that.

SSD drives also run cooler, to test this out I left both the SSD and HDD system sitting idle with out hibernating for 45 minutes with out being plugged in, I then took a forehead thermometer that you use on children and placed the thermometer on the touchpad, to the left and right of the touchpad, and over the keyboard. The SSD system was 5 to 8 degrees cooler than the HDD system. So yes SSD does indeed run cooler.

Then I tested battery life, I keep hearing that SSD is greener, that you get better battery life. So I put it to the test, I sat down and for 3 hours and 13 minutes browsed the web, played videos on YouTube, checked my email, wrote a few emails chatted on IM with the SSD system. The I did the very same thing with the HDD system, but this time I was able to use the system for 3 hours 19 minutes. I thought maybe I did something wrong, I really wanted SSD to win so I charged the battery up again and for 3 hours and 04 minutes this time I browsed the web etc. So I charged the battery up again and browsed the web this time for 3 hours 10 minutes. I finally gave up.

I was hoping SSD would give me a longer battery life, but it wasn’t. So I spoke with Samsung and this is the explanation they gave me. Basically they said that since the SDD drive works so fast the CPU has no time to rest causing the CPU to use up more battery faster than it would with an Platter drive, because the CPU can idel for a second or two while the HDD begins to do it’s job.

I have to admit I didn’t buy the explanation at first, I thought they were BS’ing me, so I ran the test again and this time I kept track of what I was doing and how much I did. I have to say I accomplished more working with the SSD system than the HDD system. So maybe its true.

I personally can’t wait to see SSD in desktops, or on servers. Hell cloud computing could benefit from SSD drives. Imagine how much faster Google Apps would be or Microsofts Live Services. Plus the life span of SSD drives outweigh the cost. For an HDD drive you are looking at a life span of 5 - 10 years, for an SSD drive it’s over 30 years.

Post Tags: review  samsung  storage  ssd 

Next entry: Review: Evo-G MB2 Mouse Anchor Previous entry: HP Releases Updated MediaSmart server with Mac Support