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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."

3 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. Seek Times Make the Difference by pancrace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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    I don't have a .sig
  3. 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