To SSD or not SSD
(I originally wrote this on 10/2/2010) To think just 12 years ago the Ultra ATA-33 drives were just hitting the market, the idea of having 33mb/sec bandwidth that was previously only available in the expensive Ultra SCSI 2 drives a couple years earlier was unheard of. Also at that time 3D gaming on the PC had just started to really take off with offerings from 3Dfx. ATI and nVidia really taking the previously slow desktop PCs into the expensive high performance Workstation market held by SGI Octanes and Sun Ultras. 
As shown in the graph above, the bandwidth available in consumer desktops and laptops has gone up exponentially in the last 7 years. You might be asking yourself, hard drives until recently haven’t even used SATA 1.0’s 150mb/sec bandwidth. The answer, Solid State Drives (SSDs) as many of the higher end SSDs get over 300mb/sec, hence the drive (no pun intended) for SATA III’s 600mb/sec bandwidth. In this article I hope to show the performance differences between using traditional mechanical drives and Solid State drives in both Laptop and Desktop platforms. While by no means is this a comprehensive test as I had to test some of these drives on different platforms and only used one benchmarking tool it should give you an idea of where Storage Technology is heading in comparison to mechanical drives. For this article I used the latest HD Tune 4.6, available here: http://www.hdtune.com/download.html For each benchmark I ran the default read test 5 times and took an average, with no applications running in the background and a fresh reboot before each test. Each platform was updated to the latest SATA chipset drivers available and where applicable I included some comparisons between using AMD and nVidia SATA chipsets. As for the varying hard drives, I benchmarked every available drive I had at my disposal, whether it was an old Xbox 360 Laptop drive to a high end OCZ SSD. Without further ado, here are the results of Laptop drives: 
As you can see (and probably as expected) the two Solid State Drives won every test. What I found interesting was using the default SATA drivers that come with Windows 7; the Crucial SSD took a huge performance drop. I retested the IMATION with both and ran into a very similar result as you can see. As with anything, making sure your chipset drivers,specifically your SATA drivers are up to date and aren’t using the stock drivers is key to optimum system performance. With my brand new Dell Inspiron M501R,the Windows 7 install it came with used the stock Microsoft drivers, so I’m betting your laptop most likely is the same. It is good to note that the much cheaper Western Digital Scorpio Black was fairly close to SSD performance in read speeds, but like any mechanical drive, the more full it got the slower it went, in case nearly 3X slower than the Crucial SSD at its slowest. Access time, while not shown was also quite a bit longer (ie more of a delay between requests). Now onto the Desktop Drives: 
Clearly, a single Desktop Mechanical drive versus a single Solid State drive has nowhere near the performance. However when you add in a RAID 0 into the mix, it is a much closer race. The 4 Western Digital Black drives using the onboard AMD 890FX RAID controller nearly matched the 2 much smaller Solid State drives. Just for kicks I also included a hardware RAID solution with 8 drives albeit, not the fastest SATA II drives, destroyed all of the competition. If I had more time I would have run the 4 Western Digital Black drives in RAID 0 on that same controller. It was also interesting to note too how platter size came into play. For those that don’t know, your mechanical drive has platters, like dinner plates where your data is stored. The more platters the longer it takes to access data, thus the recent drive to get larger platters like that in the new Western Digital Black and Green series that uses 667gb platters versus 500gb platters. In a 2 TB drive, that’s reducing platters from 4 to 3, thus reducing the access time and thereby improving overall performance. Along with a 64mb cache, it was interesting to see how a 5400rpm drive was able to go head to head with a 7200rpm 32mb cache drive. Sadly I do not have a newer Western Digital Black with the 64mb cache and larger platters to compare the two. For those who don’t understand how RAID works, RAID 0 specifically takes a minimum of 2 drives and makes them into 1. So for every file written, it is written across all drives in the array. Access time on a RAID 0 array is often longer than a single drive since it has to read from 2 drives, but the transfer speed is often close to twice that of one drive, especially the burst speed. RAID 0 is often frowned upon though because if 1 of the drives fails in the array no matter how many drives you have, you lose all of your data. If you choose to have a RAID 0, make sure you have a spare drive to back up your important data or run a RAID 10, which needs a minimum of 4 identical drives, but allows for up two half the array to fail if you get lucky to lose the mirror side only. So far you are probably thinking without a doubt an SSD is in your future? There is one last “benchmark” to consider; price. Considering most people require at least 500gb for their music, pictures, games, applications and operating system, I compiled a list using the latest prices from NewEgg to achieve 500gb and calculated the cost per gigabyte and then created this chart: 
Is an SSD worth the 20X markup? I don’t think so; numbers aside it just isn’t economical to use it as both storage and application use. Having used both extensively, I came up with the perfect solution:
- Buy 1 64gb High Performance SSDs for:
- Windows 7
- Productivity Applications like Office, Visual Studio, Adobe CS Suite etc
- Games
- Buy 1 500gb High Performance Mechanical Desktop Drive for:
- Windows 7 swap file
- Music
- Movies
- Pictures
Of course if you have a lot of music, videos etc. buy a bigger mechanical drive like that of the Western Digital Black 2 TB drives for around $100 on sale. For comparison’s sake, this solution into the mix: 
While still considerably more than that of a mechanical only solution, it is still 4-5X cheaper, around $250 versus over $1100 for a SSD only system. So where do Laptops come into play? If you’re like me and use a laptop mainly for portability and have all of your music on your desktop or a network share for you to access, the answer is simple: get an SSD. Since you can’t add RAID into the mix in most laptops, you will never approach SSD performance in your laptop, while yes the Western Digital Scorpio Black series and most likely the other hard drive manufacturers high performance mechanical laptop drives are considerably faster than previous generations (as seen in the graphs above), the enormous difference in access time and effective performance in long term use negate this. A laptop already has a much slower CPU and video card than your desktop (typically at least), adding a slow drive to the mix only furthers the distance between desktop and laptop work. Of course you do not need to get a high end SSD to really see the benefits, a mid-range like that of the Crucial M225 or IMATION 225M are both faster than any mechanical drive and are 30-35% cheaper than the upper mid/high range of drives.