Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
When it comes to storage, the 3.5” and 2.5” form factors are most popular. But they're not always suitable for notebooks and netbooks. Samsung is the second vendor to introduce an mSATA-based SSD, after Intel demonstrated its SSD 310 earlier this year.
This benchmark shows us the typical throughput performance that can be measured when reading or writing a large stream of data from or to the devices. Typical 3.5” hard drives spinning at 7200 RPM typically reach 120-150 MB/s, while 2.5” drives are somewhere between 90 and 115 MB/s.
The mSATA device is capable of delivering similar maximum throughput as the PM810 2.5” drive, despite the fact that it employs twice as many NAND flash channels. In retrospect, this shouldn't be too much of a surprise; the bottleneck appears to be controller- or interface-based, and not related to available bandwidth from the memory itself.
The results are a bit different when it comes to writes, but 173 MB/s still is a respectable result for a device with only 64 GB of NAND flash across four channels. Comparable drives, such as the Intel 310, do not reach this level of write throughput. The Intel drive tops out at just over 80 MB/s, which can actually be beaten by many mechanical hard drives.
