SSD, or HDD?

Hard drives only read at 115Mb/sec to roughly 150MB/sec. And that is only on huge files are that not defragmented. Start reading lots of tiny files, and they throughput just falls off of a cliff.

SSD's start at about 500MB/sec and with the latest motherboards and slots, can do over 1400MB/sec. And next year Intel and probably Crucial will be producing SSD like devices that should be able to exceed 7500MB/sec. SSD's reading lots of small files also slow down, but nowhere nearly as bad as a hard drive. Remember that SSD's are memory. They can access their data anywhere in the unit almost instantly, even if it is small files.

The difference between a hard drive and an SSD is like night and day. A hard drive is roughly 5 times slower than the slowest SSD. Booting your system will drop from 15 to 30 seconds down to 8 to 15 seconds. Most programs will load seemingly instantly.

There is a reason that you see people say."Once you try an SSD, you will never go back to hard drives."

A standard 7200rpm HDD has a read/write rate of 200 - 300MB/s ????? Go on dreaming that is the SATA2 specs more likely. 100-150MBps average random write/read is already hell fast for an HDD.
SSD which can go 500MBps and it is really 500MBps on SATA3 bus.

The speed difference is night and day

To make things easier,
Just buy an SSD and try it, you will never want to miss it anymore

60GB is not good tho', you need at least 250GB.
Only OS, programs, games, etc. which are on the SSD will gain the benefit of the SSD and 60GB is too small.

He just made my point! :lol:

XD yeah at best you are peaking at ~120mb per second on a really fast HDD


My sandisk does ~600mb


There are new drives that do 1500mb... XD

OP: Get a samsung 850 evo 250gb use it as the windows/games drive, with the one you have already as secondary storage

Hi,
First of all your information is a bit off.

1) File read and write speeds vary depending on the FILE SIZE. An SSD might have say a max 500MB/s read and a drive might have a 125MB/s read (4x difference) but the SSD might be over 10X faster at times. The max rating assume larger files and the reason the HDD plummets in comparison is due to having to move the physical head (seek times).

Your hard drive rating of 200-300MB/s typical is way too high. Perhaps that's from the small cache on the drive only.

*Also, the hard drive slows down depending on where the data is physically. Assuming everything's defragged (contiguous) then the data on the INNER part of the drive is almost exactly 2X SLOWER to access than the OUTER part of the drive.

2) The benefit varies depending on the task. Yes, boot times as indicated. Rather than qualify it in actual numbers I'll just say that the basic experience is usually a lot "snappier" with an SSD. Having things load regularly in say a HALF SECOND rather than TWO SECONDS starts to be noticeable.

*Basically using an SSD then going back to a hard drive is usually pretty noticeable.

3) GAMING mainly only benefits with the initial LOAD of the game and periodic level loads. For most games this is not a big deal but for games like SKYRIM it really is. Every time you enter a dungeon or building, or jump to a new map point it's noticeably faster on an SSD.

4) SSD's don't take a long time to come out of idle. Every time I access something on my HDD (or use search in general) it takes roughly EIGHT seconds for my hard drives to spin up and be usable. The solution is to disable that but then they're noisier and wear out faster (so I use 20 minutes).

Summary:
So it really VARIES a lot where the benefits are but any modern SSD will make your system "snappier" overall.

The main reason why SSDs feels so fast is its ultra low access latency. A typical HDD had an access time of 15-17ms where as access time with an SSD its just 0.2 ms or lower. You may be able to match a single SATA SSD transfer rate by clubbing 2 or 3 HDD in RAID 0 but still you wont feel the snappiness of having SSD thanks to its low access time.

Use the SSD as a boot drive which should include OS, Programs and frequently played games. 60GB SSD is pretty low in capacity windows itself will consumes a good portion of it and you may find it difficult to make room for even programs like Office, Photoshop etc. and you cant store any of the modern games on a 60GB drive either. 120GB is the bare minimum to consider at the moment.

When an application is loaded on the computer there are a lot of small files loaded with it. These files on a HDD are loaded at a rate of 0.3 - 4.75MB/s (4k Data transfers) on even the fastest of HDD's (In particular the WD 1TB 10,000RPM Velociraptor). An SSD on the other hand is able to achieve 16.4-106MB/s.(In this case the Samsung 250GB Evo) meaning it is anywhere from 3.5x to 353.3x depending the workload.

If you really want to know if an SSD will help your workload keep your taskmanager open (Win8/Win 10) and watch your CPU and HDD workloads. in a HDD limited environment the HDD will show 100% usage while the CPU is showing a minor load. (in my 4 core I would see 10-20% loads.) when I moved to using an SSD loading my OS would show a sharp upturn to 100% load and dropping my typical 4-5 minute boot time to a less than 1 minute. (I have a lot of software loading at boot.). Basically when using an SSD the workload will move from waiting on the drive to read the data to waiting on your CPU to process the data.

EDIT:
As for the workload you offered it is a bit off to think that the 210MB/s sustained speed (actually a short burst speed) would be likely as the game isn't going to read the whole file at once it is going to pull multiple points of data from that file at a time and not necessarily in a way that is ideal for a HDD. Think of the files as folders with multiple files in it.

A hdd now has a write speed of 100-170MB/s (in ideal conditions, when working with a single large file, nor composed of smaller files) A typical SATA III ssd now has a write and read speed over 500MB/s and new PCIe ssd's and M2 ssd (also NVMe etc.) can write at speed of up to 1400MB/s). That is a huge difference. Also, this is not the only difference. There is also a very important difference in acces time.
Have a look at this page:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001396.htm
P.S. The best solution in terms of speed , capacity and also price is to get an ssd for OS, programs and a hdd for storing games videos, etc. ( games load faster on ssd, but it doesn't affect frame rates).
I suggest you buy a Samsung 250gb 850 Evo because that is best for the price and get a 1tb WD hdd (overall best performance), in case you are buying a pc.

60GB definitely not enough.

It is at first with a basic installation but fast forward with updates and programs and it's nearly impossible to stay under 60GB. And by 60GB that may mean 50GB maximum due to formatting and overprovisioning.

What SSD?
Samsung 850 EVO (120GB or 250GB):
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/samsung-internal-hard-drive-mz75e120bam

(check prices/sales because it's $65USD roughly for the 120GB but only $90USD for the 250GB... just $25 more)

*I'm careful to periodically move unneeded downloads to my hard drive (I don't download to hard drive initially as I hate waking up the drive just for a small file to download). I also do a "SYSTEM CLEANUP" (right-click the c-drive in Windows Explorer-> Properties... )

I've got several large programs and other things that got installed to my C-drive since I have a large Steam account and I've stabilized at roughly 75GB so having a 120GB (100GB usable say due to format/overprovision) is very possible.

Other:
Going with an SSD will require either cloning or reinstalling Windows. I've successfully cloned an HDD to SSD with Machrium Reflect Free (and checking "verify" to be safe).

If going to Windows 10 from W7/8.1 then I'd do the basics like THIS:
1) upgrade to Windows 10 on same HDD
2) insert SSD to test and apply firmware updates if need be (via Samsung Magician for Samsung SSD's)
3) prepare for Clean Install
4) shut down and unhook any hard drives
5) Insert Windows 10 disc or USB (see below) and install fresh
6) update drivers, reinstall programs etc
7) Hookup hard drive again (you can copy data back... if HDD is booted to instead of SSD then must change BIOS boot order back to SSD)

W10 Install disc:
Microsoft Media Creation Tool-> Run this but choose "other PC" to allow download of the ISO image. Then burn that to DVD with Imgburn of USB thumb drive with Rufus
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install

*This is a very quick overview.

Even considering the ssd just for one program I would stiil rcommend to get a bigger SSD for os and other programs. It would improve the response time and overall experience of using the pc.

My Dumbed down version and my reasoning for my SSD is as follows. We can all talk about the speeds and facts remain the SSD is much faster than a HDD. I am sure you can see with the other\s posts and just comparing a SSD side by side to a HDD.

The question you must ask yourself is why you want a SSD, if you want it because you want a boost in gaming performance, look elsewhere.
An SSD is not going to give you a massive performance boost. It will cut down loading times when you load up the game, but then that's about all.

I purchased an SSD for my OS, means my Os will boot up faster and any application/program I run through my OS will run much faster. I have a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB that is rated a very decent SSD. I chose 250GB so that I can install the game I am activly playing the most on the drive without having to worry about space for the OS. I am not going to install every game on there as the performance increase in gaming is so very low compared to a GPU upgrade etc.

My question is, Why do you want a new HDD/SSD ? if it is for storage, go for the HDD, if it is for OS/applications go SSD.

That is just why I decided to get an SSD, and I LOVE it. my OS boots so damn fast, you will not believe it till you see it.

It's all down to access times, not so much MB/s. Hard drives have access times measured in milliseconds (and they do many thousands of accesses every time you load an application or game so those milliseconds quickly add up to seconds). It's more difficult to quantify the "access time" of an SSD; electronically, it's measured in nanoseconds (that's a million times smaller than a millisecond) but there are a few extra things like the latency of the SATA controller and PCI bus that can end up adding a few microseconds - negligible when dealing with hard drives but significant with an SSD.

I've told this story before but it's relevant again here. I used to be a SSD doubter too, so when I built my shiny new workstation (it was a few years ago so SSDs were a lot more expensive then) I went for tried and trusted technology that I knew. I fitted three 15,000rpm hard drives on a hardware RAID controller with battery-backed cache memory. A whopping 72GB of storage for about £300 - about the same as a 64GB SSD at the time. It was fast, faster than anything I'd ever used before.

Then I decided that my old 2004-vintage laptop needed a bit more disk space. Its 40GB drive was bulging but I couldn't get a compatible replacement because it was one of those IBM 1.8" ones that used the 2.5" IDE connector along the long edge of the drive rather than the usual 1.8" micro-ATA connector on the short edge. Being Parallel ATA, I couldn't just drop in a modern hard drive or SSD.

So I bought a 64GB CompactFlash card intended for use in a digital camera, together with a CF-to-IDE adaptor.

I didn't expect wonders - it's a camera memory card, after all, and wasn't designed to be used as a general-purpose storage device.

My old, single-core, 1.2GHz laptop with 1.5GB RAM blew my 6-core, 3.2GHz, 16GB workstation out of the water when booting and loading applications. Its boot time was less than a third of the workstation's and everything felt so much more responsive.

I pretty soon replaced the 15k hard drives with a cheap, consumer-grade SSD, and not even one of the fastest ones as rated by the benchmarks. The 10k drives in my old system will be going the same way soon, even though I only use it occasionally when I visit my parents - it just feels so unbearably slow.

As has been said before - just buy an SSD. It's worth it and then some. If you really need lots of capacity for storing media files, then have a big hard drive as well, just for those.

Just my tuppence' worth.

Stephen