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

Seek Times Make the Difference

[pancrace]

We installed one of these for processing millions of small, read-only database transactions. The database only gets written once a day, but is too big for efficient cacheing. Even with a U320 15k drive we were still suffering, only being able to run about 700/min. With a flash drive, we're running over 25,000/min, peaking at 50,000/min. But the weekly copy of the database takes about 20 minutes, vs the 3 or 4 minutes it used to take.

- p