Slipping inside an Ultrabook
In the second part of the performance evaluation, we're comparing the Plextor mSATA drive to a regular 320GB mechanical drive inside an HP Ultrabook.
There's clearly not a lot in it with respect to cold boot-up times. The laptop takes a while to get past the HP POST screen.
And it takes a while to shut down, too.
The innate speed of the mSATA SSD is shown by the data-transfer graphs, where the Plextor is over 2x faster than the mechanical drive. Also, though it's obvious in use, the lack of HDD noise is real bonus.
Writing from a subjective level, the laptop feels far more responsive as a result of the mSATA update; pages open more quickly, games load that bit faster and battery-life is improved by around 15 minutes, jumping up to 4 hours 30 minutes in our rundown test.
But here's the obvious rub; this 'Ultrabook' features a regular SATA interface that will happily accept all 2.5in SSDs, matching the Plextor's performance, so there's really no reason to add mSATA unless you want to increase overall capacity. mSATA drives make most sense in high-end Ultrabooks that are thin enough to eschew the SATA connector in favour of sleeker, smaller mSATA.
