Samsung 256GB MLC SSD PB22-J review

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Verdict:

This is the best SSD you can buy, but its practical benefits don't justify its high price.

Review Date: 9 Jul 2009

Price when reviewed: £568

Supplier: http://www.scan.co.uk

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Most internal laptop SSDs tend to have very little storage space when compared to similarly priced 2?in hard disks - so little, in fact, that they're impractical for many users.

However, Samsung's latest SSD has a respectable capacity of 256GB. This is still only half that of the highest-capacity laptop disks available, and the PB22-J is much more expensive than a similarly sized normal hard disk, with a cost per gigabyte of £2.14.

We saw no improvement in the battery life of our test laptop with Samsung's SSD fitted, but its performance at copying files in our benchmarks was truly remarkable. It was consistently fast at copying both large and small files. It was so fast that it exceeded the speeds of all the 7,200 and 10,000rpm desktop hard disks we've seen. Such high-speed transfers will be useful for those dealing with huge files, such as HD video. However, users with such large files will want far more storage than even this comparatively big SSD can provide.

Although the PB22-J's performance impressed us, you're still making a major sacrifice in terms of capacity. Given its incredibly high price we feel this is an unreasonable compromise, making it more of an expensive oddity than a desirable piece of kit.

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