Review - Samsung PB22-J 256GB SSD
11/05/09 11:44
Firstly let's get the price issue out of the way. Yes SSD's are way more expensive than their HD counterpart, so your purchasing decision will be made based on performance metrics rather than a value proposition. Price will come into the equation however when you start comparing different brands of SSD and their relative performance with each other.
After doing a lot of research and reading every review I could find (including a very thorough review at Anandtech.com which I highly recommend) it came down to decision between the OCZ vertex series and the Samsung PB22-J, and due to a number of issues with the OCZ and sleep mode on the MacBook I plumped for the Samsung PB-22J 256GB model.
Overview
This review and therefore my impressions are based on the following :
- Macbook Pro unibody 2.4GHZ with 4GB ram
- OS X 10.5.6
- Standard 256GB harddrive as shipped from Apple
- Full Time Machine backup prior to drive swap out.
After unboxing the Samsung, the first thing you notice is how solid it looks, with it’s brushed metal finish. Samsung have obviously put a bit of thought into the design of something that will never see the light of day once installed in your laptop.
Impressions
Once installed, it was time to use the Time Machine backup to re-image the drive. I'm not quite sure why other reviewers have gone down the carbon copy cloner route, but am happy to listen.
I inserted the Leopard DVD into the Macbook and from the install menu selected the option to recover the system from a time machine backup. This worked flawlessly, and in just over an hour my system was back up and running exactly the way it was before the drive was swapped.
Although I've worked in the IT arena for 15 years, I was amazed at what happened next. After switching the machine on, I was presented with the desktop just 29 seconds later. Bearing in mind that a good percentage of this time is the Macbook doing it's standard POST, this was amazing. I then fired up a few different apps that I use on a day to day basis, and continued to be amazed. I was obviously expecting the SSD to be quicker than the standard HD, but it was the degree of speedup was something else. Launching iphoto (with a 32GB library) went from 11.7 seconds to 3 seconds. MS Word 2008 from 12.3 seconds to 2.9, and launching mail.app was almost too quick measure, but went from 3.4 seconds to 0.7.
Although not quite as impressive, Vmware Fusion with a 16GB Windows XP SP3 VM still showed a measurable improvement,and one can only assume that this will improve further once VMware provide an SSD optimised host driver as part of the vware tools package. Suspending/resuming this Windows XP virtual machine showed the greatest improvement going from 31 seconds to resume, down to 16 seconds. Suspending also dropped from 14 seconds to 10 seconds. The full table of results can be seen below.
| Application | HD Launch | SSD Launch |
| Power on to desktop | 51 | 29 |
| Shutdown | 10.7 | 5 |
| iPhoto | 11.7 | 3.0 |
| MS Word 2008 | 12.3 | 2.9 |
| MS Excel 2008 | 6.0 | 3.4 |
| Mail.app | 3.4 | 0.8 |
| Safari 4 (beta) | 4.0 | 0.7 |
| Firefox 3 | 5.5 | 1.0 |
| iTunes | 6.4 | 1.6 |
| VMWare timings | ||
| Suspend VM | 14.2 | 10.0 |
| Resume from suspend | 31.0 | 16.0 |
| Shutdown VM | 37.0 | 23.0 |
| Startup VM to logon | 65.0 | 45.0 |
| IE 7 | 4.5 | 2.1 |
| Outlook | 4.6 | 2.0 |
Conclusion
If you’re in the market to improve the performance of your laptop, without a shadow of a doubt going down the route of an SSD will give you that boost. However, this needs to be caveated with the cost. I paid £558 (Approx US$840) for this drive from Novatech, and you can get the equivalent HDD in the £50 (Approx US$75) bracket, now this is a massive price differential, which will obviously reduce over time as the technology becomes more widely available and the competition increases. In my case, I use the laptop as my daily workhorse, spending as much time in a Windows XP VM, as I do in the Mac environment, and the speed boost has been a revelation.
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