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Solid-state disks (SSDs) are more rugged than hard disks and can be dramatically faster, too, but they also tend to be much more expensive. Imation’s 32GB M-Class is the cheapest internal SSD laptop disk we’ve seen, but its small capacity limits its usefulness. Like other SSDs, the M-Class is silent and generates little heat, which are useful traits for a laptop hard disk. Unlike some SSDs we’ve seen, it didn’t improve the battery life of our laptop, though at least it didn’t decrease it. Its inconsistent performance in our file-transfer tests was disappointing. It read large files at 78.3MB/s and small files at 80.9MB/s, which is almost as quick as a 7,200rpm desktop hard disk. It was much slower at writing files, though. Large files were written at 25.8MB/s, while small files were written at a particularly sluggish 12.6MB/s.
Imation’s M-Class may be cheap for a SSD, but unless you particularly need rugged storage, its inconsistent performance and high cost per gigabyte of £3.25 means it’s not a good buy.
