Do SSDs outperform HDDs? Laptop Mag- not necessarily
The Solid State Disk (SSD) is starting to appear in a lot of mini-notebooks since one was initially included in the orginal Asus EEE PC. We’ve all been waiting for them to drop low enough in price that we can replace every hard drive we own with them but pricing hasn’t budged enough yet. Our friends over at Laptop Magazine decided to take that cool new MSI Wind that has everyone so excited and replace the internal hard drive with a SSD and see how performance compared. I won’t spoil their findings but let’s just say they’re not sad they made the swap. They’re not overly thrilled either. Check it out and see if you’re as surprised as I am.
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Well, to use a Sandisk SSD is not a good example. Sandisk are not the fasters one in the market, they are the cheapers and long time ago the worse. But anyway… from my own tests a good SSD will perform around the same than a 7200 RPM Hitachi 2,5 HDD. In that article they are comparing Sandisk to a 5400 RPM HDD, so considering that Sandisk is not the faster…
I have also that almost all the UMPC and Tablet PC in the market use the 4200 RPM HDD that are super slow.
There is a lot of difference in flash memory speeds. This article, for example, shares some of interesting speed factors such as SLC vs MLC while discussing USB flash drives…
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9093718
Good resource for SsD real-world performance specs:
http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html
I recently installed the Super Talent FTM20GK25H 120GB SSD in my laptop. Its a MLC SSD device and I’ve noticed a nice speed bump when booting my device. It feels to have cut the boot time in half compared to the previously installed Fujitsu 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive. Launching programs seem to start faster too.
The price on this device was quite remarkable for an SSD, but still expensive compared to a standard magnetic hard drive. I bought it from NewEgg for $639
Hi,
I agree, not all SSDs are equal. I own a Dell XPS M1530 with a Sumsung 64g SSD and have been very impressed with the performance running Vista Home Premium….the 4G on the board helps too. This clip compares the Sumsung to both a 5400 rpm drive as well as a 10,000rpm Raptor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivsKEYKBsJU&feature=related
Regards,
Joe
The concept that “SSDs are faster” typically applies to read speeds in 1.8″ PATA drives. There may not be much difference between 2.5″ HDDs and SSDs. Either way, I’d be pretty happy with a 1.8″ drive that had the 67 MB/s read and 47 MB/s write speed of the 2.5″ SanDisk SATA SSD.
This reminds me of the discussions regarding cost/benefit tradeoffs of 1.8″ versus 2.5″ architectures (e.g. P1620 versus HP Mini-Note), and the $/GB affordability of hard drives versus SSDs. Currently 2.5″ hard drives seem to offer the best combination of speed, capacity and price. Solid state still makes sense for portable devices like tablets, pocket PCs, etc. that are used while in motion. Most small laptops are stationary when in use, even when “mobile”.