What's the best deal: a short stroked 1TB 7.2K rpm HDD or a 120GB SSD?

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Rafael Mestdag

Rafael Mestdag

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Mar 25, 2014
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I ask because I've just sold my 240GB ssd and now I've short stroked my 1TB 7.2K rpm HDD in the following way: about 100GB on the faster outer plate just for my OS and the rest for storage.

I thought I'd regret selling the ssd in terms of performance, but no, the short stroked HDD is performing almost as quickly as the ssd did and for a fraction of the price. And I've still got over 850GB of space to spare.

So, is this the reason why SSD's are still so expensive? They're not worth it yet? What's the best deal?
 
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BFG-9000
That's definitely not what you said in the OP but yes, Win 7 and Win 10 really aren't bad at all with a fast HDD. Most of the frequently used files are cached in RAM with Superfetch, so usually it will only hit the disk for one thing at a time when it's not found in cache. So the OS can mitigate some of the latency, but a bad one like Vista would benefit most from SSD.

Most of my HDD are 10,000rpm Velociraptors, which really aren't any faster than a modern large HDD, and they seem perfectly serviceable as OS drives. Most systems I have are multi-boot with one SSD so I do notice there is some extra lag occasionally when booted to HDD, but as you say it's not bad.
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nukemaster

nukemaster

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While a short stroked HDD will have much better access times than a non short stroked HDD. It will still not match SSDs under demanding loads. No moving parts allow even a slow SSD to crush a fast hard drive.

Once you open up the rest of it for storage, the heads no longer stay within the short stroke range meaning you loose the advantage while accessing data on the storage partition.

I say this as someone who was running 3 short stroked drives(no data partition just a small portion of each drive with raid0 to bump up the sequential read/write operations) in raid0 for years :). I have also always run single drives with the smallest partition I could for the same reason in the past(not small enough to hurt performance, but small enough to keep the data in the fast outer edge).

If this works out with the performance you want, that is great. It is a much cheaper option and you can extend the partition in the future if you require space.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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It's true--a HDD can have an excellent sequential transfer rate, and very sequential things will load just as fast from a HDD as a SSD. It's just that when trying to do multiple things at the same time, seeks occur all over the disk and will greatly slow a HDD but not a SSD. And some things are dependent on latency.

An example would be a pagefile when you run out of RAM. Assuming the SSD has a latency of 1ms and the HDD 10ms, the SSD is ~10,000x slower than RAM and the HDD is 100,000x slower. If your processor speed is 4GHz, you will waste 4 million CPU cycles just waiting for the SSD to return data, and 40 million cycles from the HDD.

10ms for a short-stroked HDD isn't bad, but 40 million wasted cycles isn't a lot better than 60 million cycles wasted in 15ms on a HDD that's not short-stroked, when you compare it with the SSD. The SSD is an order of magnitude better.
 
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Rafael Mestdag

Rafael Mestdag

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Yes, that's why i keep most of my storage files on another HDD.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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You are not understanding the problem at all. You don't have another HDD, only another partition on the same HDD. When the heads are way over in the other partition accessing storage, they are not available to service the short-stroked partition, so in order to get back there it will take the full seek time and the latency benefit of short-stroking is lost.

That's why it's a bad idea to put the pagefile on its own partition--anytime it is to be used, the heads must physically move from the OS partition over to the swap one, and that takes time.
 
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Rafael Mestdag

Rafael Mestdag

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No, when I said another HDD, I meant another physical HDD, I have the short stroked 1TB HDD and then another 2TB HDD in the same pc.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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That's definitely not what you said in the OP but yes, Win 7 and Win 10 really aren't bad at all with a fast HDD. Most of the frequently used files are cached in RAM with Superfetch, so usually it will only hit the disk for one thing at a time when it's not found in cache. So the OS can mitigate some of the latency, but a bad one like Vista would benefit most from SSD.

Most of my HDD are 10,000rpm Velociraptors, which really aren't any faster than a modern large HDD, and they seem perfectly serviceable as OS drives. Most systems I have are multi-boot with one SSD so I do notice there is some extra lag occasionally when booted to HDD, but as you say it's not bad.
 
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nukemaster

nukemaster

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Vista introduced superfetch and many of the features we still have today.

People hated and turned off that feature because it was eating all available memory(not that it was, it was just not showing it was cached). Only a slight change in the task manager turned it from a feature everyone hated to one most people like.

Poor drivers and low end systems sold with 1-2 gigabytes of memory and single core cpus ruined vista more than anything(even more so after the first service pack was released) :)
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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I think what it was in Vista was Superfetch was set to a too high priority or something. You would boot up Vista and the HDD would grind away for 10 minutes scrabbling to cache everything from scratch, making everything else unresponsive until it was done. With Win 7 you could use the desktop right away after boot while it worked in the background, and with Win 10 Fast Boot it's a resume from hibernate so everything that was cached before is still already cached on startup.

Where I notice the speed of a SSD most is if you open a folder with hundreds of thumbnails of pictures. It's instant on the SSD, while you see each one draw in with a HDD, because it has to seek to each and preview them one at a time.
 
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