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Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD
Lucas123 writes "While solid state disks may be all the rage, what's often being overlooked in the current consumer market hype is that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low — offering users good performance and massive amounts of capacity for 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte. And in a side by side comparison of overall performance of consumer SSDs and HDDs, it's hard to justify spending 10 times as much for a little more speed."
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ? Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
The article in the link is from July 31, 2008 and has nothing to do with SSDs, but rather a comparison of WD HDDs. I think they meant to link to this one: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468 from today (June 18, 2009)
Let me be the first of many to point out this article was posted July 31, 2008, though its central point still stands. Also worth nothing, this article was written before Intel's X-25 SSDs were released which moved the performance bar so high that their insane price (~3-4$/GB) started to make sense for the some people.
Should have been this article. .2 milliseconds; Seagate's 16.9 milliseconds.
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of
That's an 84X difference.
I have used a 30GB OCZ for some time now, with one system partition and one for data. I recebtly moved the system part (Windows XP) back to an older 250GB Hitachi drive, with no perceptible speed loss. The data partition holds World of Warcraft and does give a moderate speed gain on startup. It also reduces delay when switching between two WoW instances significantly. But that is about it.
I think the primary strengths of SSD are still high shock tolerance and low power needs, which makes them ideal for laptops. In some (very few) specialized applications that are aware of the geometry of a SSD (i.e. its very large effective sector size), an SSD may also give a speed improvement. There are also applications, where SSDs are significantly slower. For example small write performance is really bad.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I like this one better: http://diskcompare.com/
You're assuming all SSD's are create equal which is FAR from the truth. Most of the really cheap ones use crap chips that can make writes MUCH slower than even normal HDD's. If you buy a decent one you will pay more per GB but you will actually see an advantage vs traditional HDD's, cheap ones can often lose in every category except noise.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Slashdot submission is using the wrong article link. A mistake by the submitter: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468