After the overwhelming response to my first Solid State Drive (SSD) review listed at ‘Sandisk 32GB SSD Tested’, I formed the opinion that a completely accurate real world comparison of a SSD and HDD was a necessity. Thanks to the temporary loan of the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 ST9160823AS (160GB 7200RPM) hard drive through Dell, I was able to run comparison tests.

The computer used for these tests is a Dell XPS M1330 with an Intel T7300 Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. It's packed with all the goodies including LED display, NVidia 8400m graphics card and I have it running 64-Bit Vista Ultimate.

To start, I used two testing programs, HDTune and ATTO Disk Benchmark, to tackle all angles of storage device testing. After looking at these results for the first time, I thought it should be mentioned that my laptop runs in AHCI mode with the Intel Matrix Storage Manager update. On initially configuring my system, I learned that a system in AHCI mode with the storage manager produces far better results then a system running in ATA mode.

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HDD, Hard Disk, Hard Drive, SSD, Sandisk, Sandisk 32GB SSD, Seagate, Momentus, Seagate Momentus 7200.2, ST9160823AS, Storage, Hardware, Review