SSD or HDD, why should I care?

SSD or HDD has always been the big question in computer building.  Hard drives are not the top priority
in building a great and responsive system, but they should be. More and more people are finding that hard
drives are the main bottleneck to a PC’s response time and performance for a lot of intense apps. Games
today like Crysis or Battlefield 3 require quick hard drive speeds to load levels, or you’d be stuck waiting
up to 3 minutes just to load a level. Nothing can be more annoying than having adrenaline running through
your body only to be delayed by a level load. If you don’t game then you can surely remember those times
when you were editing a image in Photoshop and opening those images or files took forever. PCs everywhere
are sick, and the problem is hard drives. Everything has advanced in computing, except for hard drive speed.
Every year we see CPU power double, yet we don’t see HDD power double, it’s somewhat ridiculous in sense
considering how much we use our HDDs. Today we’ll be comparing hard drives to solid state drives.

SSD or HDD, I find that I just can’t afford it.

Should we completely drop the hard drive’s spinning disk and move on to the modern era? Not yet, right
now prices for SSDs are just too high.  Last year the typical 64 GB SSD was around $260, now we can get
one for half that, with much better performance. The typical use with a SSD is putting your core applications
like Windows, or your operating system on it. This in turn gives you better response times for your boot,
pagefile, or anything Windows contains. Another good use is putting applications you tend to use a lot on
the SSD, for example Firefox, Photoshop, or even games! A lot of people forget that the apps they use daily
can be put on their SSD for much quicker speeds. The most noticeable change in app speeds I see are in WinRAR,
when extracting BIG files it would take forever on my HDD, but on my SSD these things are a breeze. What
would take 10 minutes to extract now only takes about 2 minutes.

Another great thing about SSDS is that they run on SATA ports! This means that you won’t have to go around shopping for converters, that is of course assuming you’ve dropped IDE drives. IDE hard drives are a thing of the past, and if your motherboard still runs those, it’s time for an upgrade. Another important aspect contributing to the SSD vs HDD comparison war is the access times of course. The typical hard drive has an access time of around 15 ms, while an SSD access time is less than 1 ms. The main thing people tend to look at however and what SSDs and Hard drives vary most on is data transfer. The typical hard drive transfer rates consist of 80 MB/s, while that may sound OK, it’s not. I say this because the typical SSD speed can reach up to 400 MB/s. That’s more than triple what these current 7200 RPM HDDs offer. If you have an older hard drive than the write speeds might be terrible for you, the latest hard drives’ write speeds are on par with some mid range SSDs which is about 100 MB/s. If you get an SSD that has more than 200GB space then you will see write speeds well above 250MB/s however.

Another great feature of SSDs is their redundancy/longevity. SSDs are rated to last almost double what hard drives last. While the typical hard drive will last for around 500,000 hours, an SSD will last well over a million. The last thing to look at is the IOPs or input/output operations per second. I/O performance pertains more to servers however it can still impact you on a Desktop. If you run applications or games that access lots of files, then you should consider a SSD with faster IOPs. Considering the price of SSDs, its best to get a small yet powerful one that gives you a quick bang for the buck. Move your partition over to that, and core applications and your big files stay on your HDD. You’ll definitely notice the performance difference.

SSD or HDD, which SSD should I choose then?

SSD or HDD

My favorite SSD at the moment is the Crucial M4. The Crucial M4 comes with 64 GB of space, 40,000 IOPs while reading, and 20,000 IOPs while writing. The real reading speed however is 415 MB/s, while the real writing speed is 95 MB/s. In higher models the writing speed increases, but not reading speed. It also has a 256 MB cache size, which should satisfy you. The M4 features great support from crucial and firmware updates have made it more faster than the speeds advertised here. A lot of people would compare the Crucial M4 with the Crucial C300, which now costs about $5 more. Check out these benchmarks below on the Crucial M4!

SSD or HDD

They are almost up to par with each other, however the Crucial M4 has a small advantage in some areas. When transferring big files the Crucial M4 does much better than it’s competitors that are in the same price class, and this is why I choose it as the winner here. Crucial actually boasts that the Crucial M4 is seventeen percent better than it’s previous model, which is a big improvement. It’s rated to last about 1.2 million hours, so you won’t have any problems making it last, it’s just a good product to buy! So in the end we see that we will just have to wait for SSDs to become more affordable to the average consumer, until then we will be using hybrid systems of HDDs and SSDs! SSD or HDD.
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