Speed of ssd as compared to sata

98.4x times

http://www.overclockers.com/hdd-vs-ssd/

or Google it and choose one of the bazillion reviews

HDDs vary a lot, because of key engineering characteristics.

For example, note the obvious difference between HDDs
with and without perpendicular magnetic recording here:




p.s. a googolplex is still larger than a bazillion (sticks tongue out here  

http://www.googolplex.com/



MRFS

Even though SATA II drives are rated at 3.0Gbps, then NEVER come close to saturating that bandwidth!

My best HDD only gets read/writes near 100MB/s (or 1.0Gbps). Far cry from the SATA II bandwidth rating!

Now SSDs vary, but an Intel X25-M 80GB is rated at read/writes of 250/70, and this is very close to what they actually give!

Yes, writes are slower on an SSD than HDD, but once the OS installed, READS ARE WHERE IT'S AT!

Once you go SSD, you'll never go back!

Comparable to about two drives in Raid-0 the Intel version at least. Try benchmarking some of those Raptor's at 10,000rpm to see if it can knock out SSD! For near performance and more hdd capacity 3.5in/2.5in drives win at 7200rpm I would put like 5 in raid-5 for back up and speed for around the same price or if you have money to burn go two ssd in raid 0!

Raptors are overrated. They did have their day, but other drives (Samsung SpinPoint, Seagate 7200.12) have caught up, and are far cheaper! I has to do with platter size and data compression.

There was an article that 4 HDD in RAID 0 actually beat a single SSD. They used "drive striping." Sorry, I can't find the link. It might be on Anandtech.com.

I have 2 HDD in RAID 0, and r/w peaks at 150MB/s. This is only 56% of an iX25-M. My single drive peaks over 100MB/s. I has benchmarks posted somewhere in here: Intel SSDs in RAID 0 - Long term use

FYI: RAID 5 requires 4 drives, and RAID should not be used in place of backups. I'll give the link if you want.

It's not the sequencial read/writes that give the SSD it's BIG speed increase, it's the Small file (4K) Random read / write were SSDs clobber HDDs. Anywheres from 10x to 40x and placing HDDs in Raid0 does not improve their Random read /writes except by a small percentage. Short stoking does help as it cuts down the access time - at the expense of capacity. Short stroked a pair of WD blacks and it cut access time from approx 12.6 to about 9.4 mSec. BUT access time for SSDs are around point 1 mSec still about 94x faster in access time.

Is it worth it - price vs performance, That's a question only the user can answer. Is the faster boot times (How often do you boot/reboot), Programs load faster, but for many this is marginal, game maps will load faster - not a real biggy for me as I do not game.

Would I swap my 3 SSDs (1 Desktop, 2 laptops) - NO WAY.