After years of research the hard disk manufacturers finally came to an idea that would make lots of money – dress those 2.5-inch cheap disks in plastic, give them a USB interface and people will buy them. And they do, actually. Now every hard disk maker has its own brand of external HDDs, plus there are countless OEM manufacturers, but all they do is to offer the same thing in different package. But finally someone had a really good idea: Samsung.
We guess it’s not easy to manufacture refrigerators, mobile phones, computer monitors and vacuum cleaners while you try to convince your customers that you are one of the TOP HDD manufacturers worldwide, but Samsung seem to have experience selling everything, so they really made it to the TOP 5 disk makers. Thing is that they also make mobile HDDs plus the ultra mobile 1.8-inch drives, which are hardly used outside small devices and gadgets.
But what is an external HDD if not a regular pocket gadget? If people only bought these to extend their disk space, we’d agree they have to be as big as notebook disks, but moset customers seem to seek something bigger than a flash drive yet small and handy. Most manufacturers started to make smaller shells for their 2.5-inch disks while others like Samsung just started to make 1.8″ drives with capacity up to 250 GB. Now people say those are slower, but could someone explain us why anyone would need fast disk attacked on one of the slowest interfaces today?
In theory USB 2.0 can manage up to 400 Mbps, but in practice you would achieve more like 25~30 MB/s transfer rate on any external disk. We’ve tested many of those disks, and we all know eSATA interface is better, but it couldn’t make it to every computer and external drive, plus USB is what its name says – universal. So when you have a transfer limit of 30 megabytes per second, you just don’t need faster disks, but smaller, just like Samsung’s S1 mini.
Samsung S1 read speed measured with HDTune
As you can see, the best speed this disk achieved was same as any other – around 30 MB/s, and the seek time was just as expected too.
Same picture but in ATTO Benchmark
ATTO confirmed the results from HDTune, so we left the benchmark part behind. What we started to wonder is why would anyone buy twice bigger drive if that one has same speed and its price is not much higher? Strangely, but the answer came easy – people just don’t know about those 1.8-inch drives. plus they are more expensive. Samsung S1 is something that you could have bought instead of a drive that must sit in your bag, and it will free up some space. It’s fast, small and a bit overpriced for a product as trivial as pocket drive, but it holds its own well against the whole niche of bigger disks the companies offer today.
3/10 because it costs twice as much as 2.5-inch USB HDD, yet it is so good that there is no denial of its attractiveness.
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