Samsung SSD Review

By George Harding

SSD (Solid State Disk) is growing in popularity, as they become more available and prices drop. Their capacity is nowhere near as large as a hard disk, being 256 GB or less, but they are big enough to hold your operating system, with the rest of your files on the hard disk.

The advantage of this arrangement is that the operating system starts up much faster than it does from a hard disk. The moving parts in the hard disk are certainly fast, but do not come close to electron movement alone.

I received for review a Samsung SSD 830 series 128 GB. It uses the SATA connection type, which for me required purchasing a power cable and one to connect to the motherboard. These two cables are inexpensive.

The kit came with a very nice Quick User Manual, a Review Guide, the SSD and two CD-ROMs. One of the CDs contains Norton Ghost, which can be used to back up your computer to the SSD. The other has several useful files.

As it turned out, the SSD is not large enough to use for cloning my C: drive. But you can imagine that the process has been completed. This step is done with both the hard disk and the SSD connected.

Next, you shut down the computer, disconnect or remove the hard disk drive and restart the computer. It may be necessary to enter the BIOS to set the SSD as the primary boot device.

When you restart, it should boot from the SSD. You will notice that the boot process is much faster.

Not only is startup faster, but loading programs, especially large ones, will also be faster.

Samsung SSD 830 128 GB      www.samsung.com                   MSRP $230