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Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs

Posted by timothy on from the all-those-Ds-at-once dept.

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."

6 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. bad test by Werrismys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In typical use most of the time is spent seeking, not just reading or writing sequential blocks. The Windows XP disk IO is especially brain damaged in this regard (does not even try to order or prioritize disk I/O). Copying DVD images from one drive another is not typical use case.

    --
    'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
  2. Not very good reasons... by MrKevvy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    But of course not the metrics that really matter, which SSD's vastly excel at and make them worth the price for many people: MTBF, power consumption, ruggedness and noise level.

    --
    -- Insert witty one-liner here. --
    1. Re:Not very good reasons... by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If I remember correctly the first LCD monitors were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't hold a candle to their CRT brothers. But since they saved so much space and energy, within a few years those problems vanished. I'd say it's still too early to close the books on SSDs.

      I know it's not a car analogy, I humbly beg the forgiveness of the /. community.

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
  3. Power Consumption by Ironsides · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Too bad he didn't include power consumption. If I'm going to use an SSD for anytime soon, it will be in a laptop where power is my key concern. Performance is more of a desktop/high end issue right now.

    --
    Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
  4. SSDs are ideal for servers by ncw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As any sysadmin knows, on a busy server what creams the disk isn't Megabytes per second, it is IO transactions per second.

    According to the article the Crucial SSD has an access time of 0.4 ms which equates to 2500 IOs/s as compared to the Barracuda HDD with 13.4 ms access time which equates to a mere 75 IOs/s.

    So for servers SSDs are 33 times better!

    Bring them on ;-)

    --
    Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
  5. Re:Performance is not the key to SSD by Sancho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/07/macbook_air_hdd_and_ssd_battery_benchmarks.html indicates that the battery usage (at least compared to the HDD shipped with the Macbook Air) is negligible. No moving parts is nice, though manufacturers have addressed some of the ruggedness issues by including drop sensors. Actual, real world wear hasn't had a chance to surface yet--I'll definitely be curious to find out if SSDs live up to the speculation.