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Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the did-this-really-need-saying dept.

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."

6 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Understatement by zaibazu · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:Understatement by blitzkrieg3 · · Score: 5, Informative

      but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.

      seriously.....

      is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?

      All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds. And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).

      The best part is that this isn't even an article, just a random slashdot user musing that SSD's aren't worth it and a review of two of the newest high performance disk drives.

      Or maybe there is a typo and he actually wanted to link to this story?

  2. Wrong article linked by smallshot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

  3. This article is nearly 80 computer years old by Papabryd · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Wrong article link by crt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Should have been this article.
    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 .2 milliseconds; Seagate's 16.9 milliseconds.
    That's an 84X difference.

  5. Re:forre.st storage calculator by stiller · · Score: 5, Informative

    I like this one better: http://diskcompare.com/