Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics. The question asked by the reviewer is whether it's worth spending an additional $550 for a SSD in your PC/laptop or to plunk down the extra $1,300 for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air? The answer is a resounding No. From the story: "Neither of the SSDs fared very well when having data copied to them. Crucial (SSD) needed 243 seconds and Ridata (SSD) took 264.5 seconds. The Momentus and Barracuda hard drives shaved nearly a full minute from those times at 185 seconds. In the other direction, copying the data from the drives, Crucial sprinted ahead at 130.7 seconds, but the mechanical Momentus drive wasn't far behind at 144.7 seconds."

Comments

w00t!

[Anonymous Coward]

First post?

And this was on a standard 4400RPM drive in a ThinkPad.... not that that would affect posting to a web page...

Re:bad test

[Dirtside]

meaning you could play five Blu-Ray movies at once

I think someone's just invented a new metric unit for measuring bandwidth!

Re:Those Who Write

[winkydink]

I haven't used any swapspace for years on my desktops, memory is so cheap now that there's no point. On my servers, of course, but then again it's 99.9% unused.

For example, this thinkpad has 1.25GB RAM, and I've seen at most 300MB used. Then again, I don't run Vista.

You don't run Firefox either then..