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."

bad test

[Werrismys]

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.

Not very good reasons...

[MrKevvy]

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.

Power Consumption

[Ironsides]

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.

Performance is not the key to SSD

[avdp]

IMHO, performance is not the critical factor regarding SSD. Power usage, and mostly no-moving-part (quiet and rugged) is why you want SSD in your laptop.

But on the performance front, they compared with 7200RPM hard drives, last time I checked (admittedly a while ago) most laptop are outfitted with 5400RPM drives.

I've seen this before.

[jskline]

You really have to look deep into the advertising sometimes. Only a trained person willing to do the math on these would be able to see the differences. Clearly, these devices have a legitimate purpose and place, but at this point in time, its not in the client computer. The speeds need to come up to be really practical.

Now a good purpose for these might be in desktop bound short-stack storage arrays instead of that large tera-byte drive array. They're just quick enough for data retention backups off of the mechanical drives in the client PC.

Another use is small-scale server apps that usually are bound into hardware in some form of internet controllable appliance. Speed isn't really a major factor here for this and these would potentially work well.

Just my opinion. Subject to change.

SSDs are ideal for servers

[ncw]

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 ;-)

Re:Not very good reasons...

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

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.

Re:Performance is not the key to SSD

[Sancho]

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/07/macbook_air_hdd_and_ssd_battery_benchmarks.html [appleinsider.com] 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.

Re:What about reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I hope your resume is up to date...

Re:SSDs are ideal for servers

[AlexCV]

FUD!

A modern SSD is able to handle write intensive database application with reliability on par with HDDs. The SSD logic spreads the writes around the disk to prevent premature wear so a record updated a million times might well never be written twice over any given flash cells. And even at 512 bytes each, there's 195 millions of them on a 100GB SSD. Each of which has about a 1 million cycle life and there's normally spare cells to handle failures. I'll take that over a SCSI disk.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[Belial6]

Huh. I've always thought that the cache on Hard drives was amazingly small. 16MB? Heck, give me a drive with at least a gigabyte of cache. When I boot up my computer, it should just start reading any sectors that have been used frequently.

Re:Stupid Test

[Sleepy]

+1

This is like a hybrid vehicle vs normal gas shootout, with each vehicle towing something. It's irrelevant.

He boiled down all the variables and performance profiles into just one - the one that favors traditional drives. There is NO WAY this should have been published as-is.

I can't attribute this to malice, but basically Bill O'Brien of Computerworld DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE'S DOING, and neither does his editor for letting this slide. This was probably a case of a traditional drive maker whispering in his ear that this would make a GREAT expose, and not knowing any better he walked right into it.

Besides power savings, and heat, these drives kill spinning discs on certain applications such as a read-mostly database server or file server, or any server that handles queues of small-files where a normal drive would have a read head all over the place.

Unbelievable. This is why I avoid magazine reviews and focus on (usually) better sources like Anandtech, Toms, etc. ComputerWorld is like ComputerShopper...