SSD vs. HDD

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shantd

Gawd
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Aug 2, 2008
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I know SSD are supposed to be better for use as a system drive. I'm just wondering, how much of a boost are we talking about, realistically? I've had a couple people give me contrarian viewpoints about SSDs in general. One guy told me that HDDs are actually faster when it comes to either reading or writing (I can't remember which), and the other guy told me that the additional speed you get from SSDs don't scale completely because OS aren't necessarily able to utilize it.

What are your thoughts? Have any of you gone from HDD to SSD on your systems, leaving everything else the same, and noticed a real bump in performance?
 
Huge performance increase in everyday usage. Best upgrade you will ever make, I even bought one and put it in my work laptop on my dollar just because it's such a huge difference.

Think about it, access times drop from >10ms to 0.1ms per request, and there could be hundreds in the queue. Every time you click on something it launches instantly, you can launch several programs at once. After using an SSD, there is no going back.
 
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shiznit said:
Huge performance increase in everyday usage. Best upgrade you will ever make, I even bought one and put it in my work laptop on my dollar just because it's such a huge difference.

Think about it, access times drop from >10ms to 0.1ms per request, and there could be hundreds in the queue. Every time you click on something it launches instantly, you can launch several programs at once. After using an SSD, there is no going back.
Click to expand...

this pretty much sums it up. the system responsiveness is much smother. any improvement to the slowest sub-system (disk storage) will give noticeable gain.
 
shiznit said:
Think about it, access times drop from >10ms to 0.1ms per request
Click to expand...

That's a 100 times faster, numerically. But that doesn't mean your system will literally be 100 times faster, right? What do the faster access times mean in real world gains? How much faster, for instance, does your system boot up? Or, what about write speeds? Transferring files from drive to drive?
 
Screw all that math and nuclear material to figure out the speed. Here is a method.......

Ferrari Enzo + Hard drive as the engine = MIght as well ride the city bus boy.
Ferrari Enzo + SSD = Damn this feels like a Bugati Veyron + nitrous.

Here is another method.......

There is no way to explain how Meth feels until you shoot it up. I dont know I never did it but I can't imagine it when someone tries to tell me.

SSD is the same way. I was skeptical until I purchased my first. My second ever is in my sig. And boy let me tell you its the same analogy as the meth one above.

The speed is so damn noticable that I purposely booted back to my old hard drive and was sick to my stomach. Felt like I was back on some 1996 Celeron 300d. And this is on my signature rig.

The difference is so noticable that you can have the absolute fastest liquid nitrogen super cooled 89ghz human brain cell computer chip and it will seem double as quick with SSD. Then go back to hard drive and tell me how it feels.

I say buy one and never look back again. It would be depressing if you passed up an SSD. Just use for OS stuff and maybe one or two favorite high replay games. The rest can go on a snail drive.

Lastly as others have said to me on this very forum: "The single greatest upgrade you can do to your system is SSD"
 
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Depends on the usage :) I have an HP 2440p at work and our manager bought us 80 GB Intel M drives. The problem is that we have to run Bitlocker with Windows 7, or Pointsec with Windows XP (whole disk encryption). After everything is said and done, the SSD saves me 10 seconds on bootup over the 250 GB WD Scorpio Black drive. Most apps I use I load up once in the morning and leave them up all day, just switch back and forth. The speed benefits with the SSD were minor to me. The one application I notice a definite improvement is my SCCM console when opening collections, but we're only talking about 2-3 seconds at most.

For me, it wasn't worth the space cost so I pulled the drive back out and went back to the WD drive. Ran a similar test on another laptop without any encryption and the system was noticebly smoother... but alas corporate mandates that we run full disk encryption on all devices even if it destroys the disk's performance. Damn security guys!!!
 
I'm gonna be contrarian and say I dont notice a massive difference between an SSD and a (good) HDD. :p Going from my Caviar Black 1TB to a Sandforce drive I wasn't blown away.

In a laptop however the difference is fucking enormous because they use the shittest HDDs. Putting an SSD in a mid-ranged laptop made me realise much of the performance issues I have with laptops can be blamed squarely on the shit HDD. Even high end laptops (my supervisor uses some $2000 Asus ROG laptop) with HDDs feel sluggish compared to a midranged laptop with an SSD.

In my Desktop however, I often switch between my SSD and my HDD installations of Windows 7 and while there's definitely a difference, I can't say the performance increase of the SSD is something I can't live without, coz I could, and I do, and I dont really care either way. I'm sure I wasted more time learning how to move my libraries from their default locations and learning how to symlink and being careful to always specify a different drive when installing software than the SSD speed up saves (since my SSD isn't big enough to handle everything).
 
It's all going to depend on what you use it for. SSD's will give you crazy fast application load times and data read / write speeds. I didn't believe it myself until I saw Win 7 load in about 3 seconds. Its blew my mind.
 
I agree with the above posters, its an incredible increase. The one thing I did was build the system in sig at one time, so everything was faster, so it was hard to tell what the SSD brought, since everything was brand new and sooo much faster than my old rig, (athlon x2 6000, 8800gtx, 250GB hitachi, etc).
But here is something I never used to do or never thought I would do. I shut off my computer routinely now, like at night or whenever I am not going to be using it. I don't mind rebooting anymore, because from OS up, to down, to back up and running is a very short amount of time. I have had this build now for about six months and I still don't mind rebooting due to the SSD speed.
 
I've built about a dozen systems with various SSD's now (built probably 150 systems in the last 15 years) and I'll never build one again without a SSD as the OS disk. The access time feel is the biggest difference, a system just feels snappier overall. Multi-tasking is faster switching around. Since going with SSD's I hardly ever have 'wait time' with the hourglass spinning around and unresponsive moments are a thing of the past. I turn my system on and by the time I can sit down and pull the keyboard tray out I'm ready to go. Gaming load times are way down. Installs go fast.

If you leave your system on all the time and just have a browser or app open all the time (basically running everything from RAM) you won't see too much of a difference.
 
Have any of you actually timed how long it takes to boot windows up, from the time you press the power button to the time you hear the music? I'm clocked in at roughly 45 seconds. Wondering how much faster we're talking for SSD...
 
shantd said:
Have any of you actually timed how long it takes to boot windows up, from the time you press the power button to the time you hear the music? I'm clocked in at roughly 45 seconds. Wondering how much faster we're talking for SSD...
Click to expand...

I've personally seen Win 7 boot in under 3 seconds. Sometimes you can barely see the splash screen before it goes away.
 
shantd said:
Have any of you actually timed how long it takes to boot windows up, from the time you press the power button to the time you hear the music? I'm clocked in at roughly 45 seconds. Wondering how much faster we're talking for SSD...
Click to expand...

For me on a HP8440P (running Bitlocker)...

SSD -> 45 seconds
HDD -> 58 seconds

For Windows XP (running Pointsec)...

SSD -> 58 seconds
HDD -> 112 seconds

So for me.. about 15 seconds faster on the SSD... and my daily usage doesn't require a lot of loading/unloading of applications... so the 250GB vs 80GB is more important to me...
 
shantd said:
Have any of you actually timed how long it takes to boot windows up, from the time you press the power button to the time you hear the music? I'm clocked in at roughly 45 seconds. Wondering how much faster we're talking for SSD...
Click to expand...

When I had a clean install, my i5 750 w/ OCZ agility would go from power button to desktop in 20 seconds. The system was much much faster than my raid 0 raptors, and that is with a first gen Sata II SSD. New ones are much faster. Going from HDD to SSD will be the most noticeable upgrade you make on a system, and you will dread having to work on non SSD systems.
 
For me the primary appeal was loading games and applications. Photoshop CS5 loads in ~7s compared to ~30s, Battlefield 2 loads levels at least 3x as fast, and windows boots 2x as fast. This may not seem like much, but over weeks and months that adds up to a LOT of additional waiting...
 
Windows 7 installs in 12 mins from the point where you pick the HD you want to install from.

windows-7-install-layout.jpg
 
Tudz said:
I'm gonna be contrarian and say I dont notice a massive difference between an SSD and a (good) HDD. :p Going from my Caviar Black 1TB to a Sandforce drive I wasn't blown away.

In a laptop however the difference is fucking enormous because they use the shittest HDDs. Putting an SSD in a mid-ranged laptop made me realise much of the performance issues I have with laptops can be blamed squarely on the shit HDD. Even high end laptops (my supervisor uses some $2000 Asus ROG laptop) with HDDs feel sluggish compared to a midranged laptop with an SSD.

In my Desktop however, I often switch between my SSD and my HDD installations of Windows 7 and while there's definitely a difference, I can't say the performance increase of the SSD is something I can't live without, coz I could, and I do, and I dont really care either way. I'm sure I wasted more time learning how to move my libraries from their default locations and learning how to symlink and being careful to always specify a different drive when installing software than the SSD speed up saves (since my SSD isn't big enough to handle everything).
Click to expand...

QFT. I'm using 2x 1TB spinpoint F4's in a Raid 0, and I have fast load times, fast file transfer times, and I don't have to worry about filling up my C:
2x 1TB spinpoint F4's = $120 for 2TB of awesome sauce.

Screw the ssd market for now. Drop the price on the 240GB models & I'll reconsider.
I've got an Agility 2 60GB that I had as my C: for about a year and got sick of the small size. Moved it to my HTPC and went to Raid 0. HTPC is nice and responsive, and my primary comp has plenty of space on c:

sustained reads of 300+ MB/sec and sustained writes of 180+ MB/sec is damn good enough with 2TB.
 
Best bang for the money is the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive. You get comparable performance to SSDs while retaining storage density and good price. You can snag one of these 2.5" drives for about $70 shipped on NewEgg. I did some research and found that for the price to storage+performance ratio, this was actually the cheapest, best performing, and best storage density you can get for a laptop HDD. Best trade off. Got mine yesterday, cloned over night, using it right now. HDTune gave me an average seek of 0.3ms this morning. :p

Seagate Technology benchmark video
http://youtu.be/Kss98VdhSj0

Tom's Hardware benchmarks
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybrid-hard-drive-ssd,2638-5.html

Hardware Canucks benchmarks
http://www.++++++++++++++++++++/for...ntus-xt-500gb-hybrid-hard-drive-review-6.html

Basically you get the throughput of a good and decent mechanical HDD but with a similar latency (average) to SSDs. IOPs will be a little higher but negligible; still within mechanical ranges.

The real advantage to a full-on SSD is the IOPs, the power consumption, and the latency (but not most importantly if we are going from a hybrid drive). Latency is what makes the performance difference, snappiness, and responsiveness. Responsiveness is also as a result of the "random" nature of SSDs. The IOPs will especially make a difference for those that are heavy on lots of simultaneous HDD activity. The power consumption will be a major battery saver for those with laptops; turn your 6-cell battery into a 9-cell just by using an SSD (and those with 9-cells to super duper pooper cells).

If you have money, you can get 2TB WD Green EARS-model drive and an SSD for OS+scratch. Not exactly the same as hybridized, but still better.
 
Again, everyone is harping on the "you won't believe how fast Windows boots up" metric for how much a SSD improves performance - but realistically, how many times do you reboot your machine? With sleep, I reboot maybe once a week, so the "faster boot-up" argument is kind of irrelevant. A SSD is faster, no question, but I am with Tudz on this one - how much of an improvement you will see depends on what you use your computer for. WIn 7 with Superfetch and a decent amount of RAM is already pretty quick at loading apps - I don't think you are going to see much difference in load times for IE, or Firefox, or Thunderbird, or Office, or any normal apps. There is a decrease in loading times for games, but how much of a difference that makes depends on the game. The one thing that is noticeable is how the drive can handle multiple tasks at once without slowing down - so if you are un-RARing a file, the SSD still loads Office as quick as before, where a HDD might choke. And virus/malware scans are crazy fast.

Bottom line - like any high performance computer component, the value it provides has a lot to do with how you use the machine, just like the advantages of 4 or 6 or 8 cores depend on what you use the machine for.
 
I am watching a bike race on my computer. No matter how fast the hard drive is the race takes the same amount of time.

I don't see a big difference between HDD and ss drives. Even when I try.

---

I noticed that several programs check for updates before it completes loading. A faster internet connection would help much more than a faster hard drive.
 
plunger said:
Windows 7 installs in 12 mins from the point where you pick the HD you want to install from.
Click to expand...

Don't forget with the SSD in the play the bottleneck for install time is the source. DVDs are slow. Use a USB3.0 thumb drive to install Win7 from. ;)
 
GeorgeHR said:
I am watching a bike race on my computer. No matter how fast the hard drive is the race takes the same amount of time.

I don't see a big difference between HDD and ss drives. Even when I try.

---

I noticed that several programs check for updates before it completes loading. A faster internet connection would help much more than a faster hard drive.
Click to expand...

That makes zero sense.

How would a fast Internet connection be better than a SSD?
Seriously, do you even know what you are talking about?
From this post, I highly doubt it. :rolleyes:

SSDs are far faster than any mechanical HDD on the market.
If you can't see a difference, you obviously are not pushing your drives to the limit.
 
Red Falcon said:
SSDs are far faster than any mechanical HDD on the market.
If you can't see a difference, you obviously are not pushing your drives to the limit.
Click to expand...

And that's exactly the point - most users don't push their drives anywhere near the limit. Which means that for many (most?) people a SSD is a luxury that doesn't provide much value for the money.
 
Forceman said:
And that's exactly the point - most users don't push their drives anywhere near the limit. Which means that for many (most?) people a SSD is a luxury that doesn't provide much value for the money.
Click to expand...

Then why do they buy a SSD at all?

That would be like me buying four NVIDIA GPUs for quad-SLI, but I don't game or do any 3D rendering.
Then I complain about not seeing any speed increase for youtube videos that I watch.

It's the same for people who buy SSDs but don't need the speed and then don't notice it when all they do is boot up Windows.
What the hell are they thinking??? :confused:

Here's a thought: read some reviews and watch some videos on SSDs, then decide if you need one, or not if it is overkill. ZOMG logic! :rolleyes:


Pardon me for saying this, but there are about 100+ threads with the title "SSD vs HDD" or "just got a SSD, don't see a difference".
Stop making these threads, there are too many of them as it is and one more isn't helping anyone or anything.
[H]ard|Forum search function, use it!
 
Red Falcon said:
Then why do they buy a SSD at all?

That would be like me buying four NVIDIA GPUs for quad-SLI, but I don't game or do any 3D rendering.
Then I complain about not seeing any speed increase for youtube videos that I watch.

It's the same for people who buy SSDs but don't need the speed and then don't notice it when all they do is boot up Windows.
What the hell are they thinking??? :confused:

Here's a thought: read some reviews and watch some videos on SSDs, then decide if you need one, or not if it is overkill. ZOMG logic! :rolleyes:


Pardon me for saying this, but there are about 100+ threads with the title "SSD vs HDD" or "just got a SSD, don't see a difference".
Stop making these threads, there are too many of them as it is and one more isn't helping anyone or anything.
[H]ard|Forum search function, use it!
Click to expand...
Well the reason for the SSD, from a pseudo-technical marketing and sales standpoint, is the subtlety. It's like our dream for instant-on OS's. If mechanical HDDs had the same access latency as SSDs -- if that's the ONLY thing you could somehow transfer over to mechanical HDDs -- then you would need not to go farther. Oh, and at least the power consumption too, because this would result in smaller and less capacity batteries which also translates to slimmer, weightless, streamlined computers (notebooks, desktop, pads, etc).

Absolute snappiness and absolute responsiveness creates the illusion of speed and power.

Mechanical HDDs give plenty of bandwidth throughput, fine amount of IOPs (although I actually don't know how much IOPs affects performance from 100 vs 1000 vs 10000 -- but there is a minimum that would be just enough vs just slightly more than enough for 99% of the consumer market).

You want to give your customer something that does everything the instant they say and do something. You want to make your customer feel like God in the sense that everything happens instantaneously and smoothly/snappily. Illusion is what it is mostly about.

Now when it comes to needing good transfer speeds, that's getting more into "OK, you need to invest in a workstation instead, NOT a 10mm touchpad that was designed for the average consumer in terms of HDD throughput (and not the fact that the device is 10mm and a touchpad)". ;o

EDIT: In the end, the part that matters is the end user's experience. You gotta appeal to their dreams. Truth and reality isn't necessarily something you absolutely have to have sometimes, as long as they're illuded their dreams are met.
 
With the cost of what you get, at this point in time it makes perfect sense for anyone to have at the bare minimum a small ssd to handle their OS and main apps. For something that will enhance your computing experience indefinitely for the cost of a couple tanks of gas and a coffee. Whether or not it's worth it after a person trys it, is up to the user. The trend though of looking at these in a Cost per GB design needs to die. Like RAM you're buying performance, not storage space.
 
Red Falcon said:
That makes zero sense.

How would a fast Internet connection be better than a SSD?
Seriously, do you even know what you are talking about?
From this post, I highly doubt it. :rolleyes:

SSDs are far faster than any mechanical HDD on the market.
If you can't see a difference, you obviously are not pushing your drives to the limit.
Click to expand...

The problem with those who advocate SSDs as a cure all, tend to forget that there are other bottlenecks.

When the bottleneck for application start up is the application checking for an update over the internet, the internet connection might just be the bottleneck not the drive.
 
How would an Internet connection be a bottleneck to the drive?
What does an Internet connection have to do with anything, especially with this thread???

Give some examples please.

I get that there are other factors which may cause a bottleneck.
My netbook has a SSD, and the main bottleneck is the CPU.

But why limit one's self to a mechanical drive if storage capacity is not necessary?
 
Red Falcon said:
Then why do they buy a SSD at all?

That would be like me buying four NVIDIA GPUs for quad-SLI, but I don't game or do any 3D rendering.
Then I complain about not seeing any speed increase for youtube videos that I watch.

It's the same for people who buy SSDs but don't need the speed and then don't notice it when all they do is boot up Windows.
What the hell are they thinking??? :confused:
Click to expand...

Partly because every time one of these threads pop up (which I agree, is way too often) everybody piles on about how great an SSD is and how getting an SSD will make the sun shiner brighter in their ass (or words to that effect).

In other words, because people keep recommending an SSD as the cure all for everyone's computer needs - whether it really makes sense for them or not. You can't put all the blame on the uninformed new user asking the question - at least he is asking - you have to share some of it with "experts" who are going with the easy answer of "OMG yes, buy one".
 
I get that it isn't a universal fix for all situations, but for many who need drive throughput on a desktop or workstation with lots of random reads/writes, a SSD is key for performance.

For those who want to boot Windows faster, I highly doubt they will see a difference.

I still want to know how an Internet connection will fix things up though. Still waiting for an answer on this one, GeorgeHR.

GeorgeHR said:
When the bottleneck for application start up is the application checking for an update over the internet, the internet connection might just be the bottleneck not the drive.
Click to expand...

Well turn off your updates for the program, problem solved.
I hope everyone who has been here for 4+ years will be able to identify an Internet transfer issue before recommending a SSD. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
Then why do they buy a SSD at all?


Pardon me for saying this, but there are about 100+ threads with the title "SSD vs HDD" or "just got a SSD, don't see a difference".
Stop making these threads, there are too many of them as it is and one more isn't helping anyone or anything.
[H]ard|Forum search function, use it!
Click to expand...


Fair enough, I will consider your advice if you consider mine: kindly remove the pogo stick from your arse. :cool:
 
shantd said:
Have any of you actually timed how long it takes to boot windows up, from the time you press the power button to the time you hear the music? I'm clocked in at roughly 45 seconds. Wondering how much faster we're talking for SSD...
Click to expand...

This depends on factros. Some motherboards and their specific roms that have to load, raid cards, network card roms..... there is a number of factors involved but traditionally and across the board SSD is atleast 30-50% faster minumum at booting. Of coruse no one really cares about saving 15 secs of boot time.

Its loading programs, games, etc.... inside windows where its random performance really shines.

Its like going from Excel Database files for a business to a full blow SQL server. Total night and day difference in how stuff is fetched and delivered to the user.

I loaded witcher 2 on my SSD and let me tell you from clicking Icon, loading saved game, to actually playing is just under 10 secs no shit. And I do NOT have the best random io ssd being a Sandforce 2200 controller.
 
if you can't tell your programs load faster with an ssd than a hard drive... man I don't even know, see a doctor or something. your reaction times are screwed up.
 
tangoseal said:
I loaded witcher 2 on my SSD and let me tell you from clicking Icon, loading saved game, to actually playing is just under 10 secs no shit. And I do NOT have the best random io ssd being a Sandforce 2200 controller.
Click to expand...

Wow...that's amazing. It literally takes me about 2 minutes before my game's loaded. I think I'm pretty well sold. I wasn't quite sure whether or not hard drives were a major bottleneck considering the speed of current SATA technology, but apparently it was/is. Can't really see a good reason not to go with SSD, other than cost. As for storage space, I don't like to use my C: drive for storage anyway, I use separate drives for everything from videos to game installation.
 
The moment the ssd actually loads windows, 2 seconds and im in(that blue screen for windows 7 before going to the home screen, I can't even see it correctly and its gone lol).

I mainly put games on that require a lot of loading(stalker, oblivion with lots of mods) because it actually helps in those games. I also put my web browser, xfire, ventrilo and stuff like that on it so I could play a game and load that stuff without it bothering the game. Also I love to instantly browse the internet when I get on and the ssd allows it to load in 1 second or less compared to over 20 seconds on my hdd.
 
[LYL]Homer;1037670318 said:
and unresponsive moments are a thing of the past. .
Click to expand...

why would there be a co-relation from the above to SSD? For Unresponsive moments, are you talking about lock up or just pauses?

If it's pauses, I can see, if it's windows prog. locks up, and you have to click such and such to close prog., I don't see how
 
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