Storage Performance Roundup: Mechanical Disk Drives to PCIe 4.0 SSDs and Everything In Between

erek

erek

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I've been wondering about the relevance of spinners.

"We'd only recommend a mechanical hard drive as a media or backup drive since they're sluggish to use. The 5400 RPM drives were agonizingly slow to benchmark. We had to wait 20-30 minutes after booting up the system for the background tasks to finish up before we had an idle system. This would have taken just a few seconds on an SSD. This is also telling for those buying cheap laptops during the holidays; make sure whatever system you choose comes with decent solid storage."

https://www.techspot.com/review/1956-storage-performance/
 
i just bought that crucial mx500 for an upgrade to an old thinkpad. looks like i am a pretty smart guy. the "20-30 minutes after booting to idle" i am curious about, and they dont elaborate in the article. ive NEVER waited that long for the red hdd light to stop blinking on any of my old desktops with platter drives. even on the old most terribly bloated and infected vista machine... over 10 minutes to idle? no way.
 
purple_monster said:
i just bought that crucial mx500 for an upgrade to an old thinkpad. looks like i am a pretty smart guy. the "20-30 minutes after booting to idle" i am curious about, and they dont elaborate in the article. ive NEVER waited that long for the red hdd light to stop blinking on any of my old desktops with platter drives. even on the old most terribly bloated and infected vista machine... over 10 minutes to idle? no way.
Click to expand...

Last time I had a corporate job, ~8 years ago, my laptop only had an HDD and a reboot-to-usable-pc took at least 15 minutes. Updates sometimes took up to a couple of hours. Antivirus slows these things to a crawl.
 
purple_monster said:
i just bought that crucial mx500 for an upgrade to an old thinkpad. looks like i am a pretty smart guy. the "20-30 minutes after booting to idle" i am curious about, and they dont elaborate in the article. ive NEVER waited that long for the red hdd light to stop blinking on any of my old desktops with platter drives. even on the old most terribly bloated and infected vista machine... over 10 minutes to idle? no way.
Click to expand...

Bruh....20min easy back in the day.
 
Uh.. no... 20-30 minutes? I don't think so. I mean is sounds like "something to say", as if nothing has had a spinning disk for 20 years, but it's simply not true. Now... waiting 30 SECONDS can seem like a lifetime to some though.

Let me also add: How much was that 4TB NVMe?
 
purple_monster said:
the "20-30 minutes after booting to idle" i am curious about, and they dont elaborate in the article. ive NEVER waited that long for the red hdd light to stop blinking on any of my old desktops with platter drives. even on the old most terribly bloated and infected vista machine... over 10 minutes to idle? no way.
Click to expand...

Yeah I agree, that seems a bit sensationalist. Also the comment about waiting for the "background tasks to finish up before we had an idle system" seems a bit ambiguous. What exactly is their criteria for "idle", and what exactly is their criteria for a background task that has not "finished up"? Many of those tasks are SUPPOSED to run while the system isn't being used, so if they are sitting there waiting for those tasks to finish, it might not be because they haven't "finished yet", but rather, those tasks are running because no one is using the system at that moment...

Also, how many people shut-down and start-up their computer every time they use it these days? Most people I know leave their computer on, and allow it to go into sleep after a short while. They almost never actually "shut down" their computer, and probably only restart it when there is a windows update (which often occur automatically during the middle of the night). Even with a mechanical disk drive, a computer can usually resume from sleep very quickly.
 
I'm surprised that intel optane hasn't released a 4.0 drive. I think it easily could of taken an undisputed winner of the bunch.
 
I'm surprised that intel optane hasn't released a 4.0 drive. I think it easily could of taken an undisputed winner of the bunch.
Click to expand...

Probably waiting to release a PCIe 5.0 drive and xeon servers to support that..
 
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dgz said:
Last time I had a corporate job, ~8 years ago, my laptop only had an HDD and a reboot-to-usable-pc took at least 15 minutes. Updates sometimes took up to a couple of hours. Antivirus slows these things to a crawl.
Click to expand...

Yeah, 5400 rpm hard drive is the bane of my existence, They setup several lab machines a few years back with those things, and just logging in the first time can take upwards of five minutes.

They are on a lot of cheaper /older notebooks.
 
McAfee+Norton+Security Essentials, a dozen programs loading at boot, 4-5 printer software packages and windows updates that haven't installed because the computer hasn't rebooted in months + an old 5400, 2MB IDE spinner might take upwards of 20 minutes but I'd say its an outlier.
 
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A big part of it could be the amount of memory the system has. If it only has 2 GB RAM, then yeah, booting from a HD will be 10+ minutes because the page file will be constantly used due to low memory constraints. Perfect example of this: I had an old 2005-era Dell XPS M170 laptop with a single-core Pentium CPU and IDE (not SATA) 60 GB HDD w/2GB RAM and I finally gave up trying to use it in Win10 because it literally NEVER stopped pegging the drive even after over 20 minutes of waiting. The combination of bootup tasks plus built-in Win10 virus scanning completely trashes any remaining I/O the system thought it had.
 
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purple_monster said:
i just bought that crucial mx500 for an upgrade to an old thinkpad. looks like i am a pretty smart guy. the "20-30 minutes after booting to idle" i am curious about, and they dont elaborate in the article. ive NEVER waited that long for the red hdd light to stop blinking on any of my old desktops with platter drives. even on the old most terribly bloated and infected vista machine... over 10 minutes to idle? no way.
Click to expand...

My office mom's old PC took 30-45 minutes to idle desktop. Some old dual core i3 from like 2010-2012ish.

*edit* she was using this everyday up until a few months ago or so
 
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Been primarily using Crucial SSDs since the M4 was out. Have a 256GB that is still going strong since 2012.

The only 2.5" drives I recommend today for great cost to performance ratio are Samsung Evo and Crucial MX500.
 
My work computer takes about 25 mins to boot up and randomly just hangs for several mins at a time. It a dual core ivy bridge cup with 4gb ram running win7. We suppose to get new PCs every 3 years. I think I am going on 8 now.
 
A number of years ago I was asked to troubleshoot a laptop for "slow performance". When I soon realized the HDD was constantly running I ran some tests on it.
HDTune_Benchmark_SAMSUNG_HM060HC.png


Talk about painfully slow. This thing was having a heart attack just idling in Windows XP
 
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