Samsung’s Flash solid state disk (SSD) is one of the first to be available as an upgrade for end-users, instead of supplied to vendors for new laptop designs. The drive does give a boost to performance at the same time as extending the battery life, but firms considering upgrades must weigh these benefits against the cost of the unit and the effort of migrating user data.

Available from the end of July, the 32GB Flash SSD is designed to be a drop-in replacement for an existing hard drive so comes in a 2.5in enclosure with a standard ATA interface connector. This format is typical of most laptops except ultraportables, which tend to have smaller 1.8in devices.

We tested the Flash SSD in an old Dell Latitude CPt laptop, which was the only spare unit available to us with an ATA hard drive. Most laptops now ship with Serial ATA (Sata) drives, and Samsung said it plans to introduce a Sata version of its SSD in the future.

With its original 4.32GB IBM Travelstar hard drive, the laptop achieved a Business Winstone 2004 score of 3.3, which rose to 3.8 with the Samsung disk fitted. This represents an increase in overall system performance of 15 percent just by switching hard drives.

The battery life also saw a comparable increase. With its original disk, the laptop ran for three hours and 51 minutes using our BatteryMark 4.0.1 test that simulates user activity. This increased to four hours and 27 minutes with the Samsung SSD, which is at least an extra half hour of working time.

All tests were run under Windows 2000, which was the platform supplied on the Latitude test system. Its hardware specification was also barely adequate for running Windows XP, so we chose to keep the older platform.

Companies considering an upgrade for some of their laptop fleet should first consider that this can be a time-consuming process, even if the IT department has tools to clone the contents of one hard disk to another. Our test drive came pre-formatted as a FAT32 volume, for example, whereas most users are likely to want NTFS for higher performance.

Some laptops are also constructed in a way that can make upgrades tricky to perform. The hard drive of our test system was relatively easy to access, mounted in a pull-out cradle to which it was secured with four tiny screws. However, some laptops require major disassembly, involving removal of the keyboard and screen before the hard drive can be accessed.

We also found that the screws that secured the hard drive in our test laptop would not fit the relevant screw holes in the Samsung SSD case. We were able to carry out tests with the drive simply sitting in the cradle, but this is obviously not practical for a working laptop that has to be carried around.

Samsung said its Flash SSD will be sold through its reseller network, some of which are expected to offer a swap-out service for buyers, including moving all files and data to the new drive.