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Disclaimer: After writing this, I realise I've written a lot more than I intended to when I began. I am posting it anyway, as it might be a good read for at least someone in here, and I am at least a little proud of it. I've never written such a long post before, and I hope you enjoy reading it, and if you don't you're welcome to tell me.
After coming home today after a nice workout, I browsed through some old files on my computer, and I happened to find some performance Ratings from the old drives in my computer.
Now I'm the type of guy who doesn't want to go down on hardware, so my PC is pretty packed. I've got an SSD for my OS, and I'm running two Velociraptors in Raid0 (For the guys who don't know Velociraptors. They are the HDD to buy if you want performance). Lastly I have an old WD HDD labeled with the green tag (Meaning it's complete crap when looking at speeds) for movies, music and all the other things you could imagine me getting from not very legal sites (mostly porn).
I have all the tests from those disks laying around, but since then I've gotten a new intel SSD to replace my old OCZ one.
After looking at the old tests I got curious on how well my newer SSD would stack up against my HDDs and older SSD, so I wanted to do a performance analysis of the disks. Mostly I wanted to find out if the HDDs could still match SSDs in performance especially in the sequential write test, which HDDs should be so good at.
I should mention, that all my disks are running SATA2, as I'm running an older i7 CPU, without compatible motherboards that also support SATA3, which is around twice the speed of SATA2.
With that said, you can expect newer SSDs to surpass my "new" SSD even further when looking at the results.
So lets find out if HDDs can still match SSDs in performance in at least one test (the sequential write for those who've forgotten).
First I'd like to throw up my specs so you can see which hardware I ran the tests on. And also so I can gloat a little bit, because we all know whoever has the best hardware has the best.. hardware, if you get me.
For testing I used Crystal Disk Mark.
Now lets start with the results from the most boring test. The Green HDD from WD:
Lets use this as a baseline. If you have no idea how fast this disk is, don't worry it's the super slow of the super slow disks, and if you run a test on your system, and you get worse results, you should probably kill yourself, or get a new HDD, which one you pick is completely up to you.
Now let us take a look at my old OCZ SSD which I used to use as my system disk.
Now what do we gain from looking at this. Well first off, if you skim the results, you can see that the SSD wins most of the tests against the slow HDD. Actually the HDD is only faster in two test: the sequential Write and the Random Write 512KB (which might be surprising to some of you).
Now you're probably thinking how this HDD I just described as terrible can outperform the wonderful SSD in these tests. Now there is two reasons for this.
The first reason is more about maintenance than anything else. I ran these tests right after I defragmented my HDDs. If you don't know what Defragging is, it's about putting a file together in one place on your drive, so the file is easier to access for the drive. Here is a quick illustration if you don't really understand what I'm saying:
this is a fragmented hard drive. The green represent a file:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
And here is a representation of a defragmented Hard Drive. Again, the green represents a file:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
As you can see, the HDD will have a much easier time accessing the second file than the first, as it doesn't have to move its laser to sectors placed far from each other all the time to read the file, but can just read it in one go.
Defragging does not apply to SSDs the same way it does to HDDs. This is because of the way SSDs work, which I will not get into detail with here. Just know that you should never defrag an SSD, but doing it often to you HDD never hurts.
Now the second reason that old lousy HDD can keep up with the SSD in these two operations is because of the way HDDs are designed compared to SSDs.
The HDD has a disk spinning inside of it, and a laser pointer to read and write from the disk while it's spinning.
The SSD on the other hand, and correct me if I'm wrong experts, sends electricity through itself to the desired sector, and stores the data by imprinting 0s and 1s into silicone. (very simply exdplained).
The HDD has an advantage here because of how it is build. If we take the defragmentation example above, in the second example the laser pointer will simply find the end of the green Is, and start writing over the red Is. This also shows how important it is to defrag your PC.
This also applies to the random write, as if the drive is defragmented the laser will already be at a position where it can easily keep writing, and even though the write operations are random, it can just place them in order from where it already is. It should be taken into consideration that this SSD is an old one, and that it might have taken its told on it. I expect that if this test had been made when it was brand new, the random write test would be closer to that of the HDD.
On newer SSDs this problem doesn't exist any more, as their increasing speeds have made them the faster option, even for random writes.
SSDs are still the overall winner, and the other tests are the ones that really matter when it comes to fast boot times, and quick searches through the disk, which are the ones most commonly used in everyday usage.
I don't want to get into too much detail with the rest of the comparisons as we have more exciting disks to check out.
Now I want to show you guys the other two drives I have left. Lets start with the Raid Velociraptors.
First of, for those that don't know, Raid0 means that these drives work in tandem, and in theory (and almost in practice), this makes them around twice as fast. So if you want the number for a single disk, divide by two.
Those numbers do look pretty impressive though, but if you think that is fancy, wait until you see the performance of my newer single SSD
Now that is some pretty whack scores, and remember this is one SSD vs two high level HDDs working together. If you divide the numbers from the HDDs by two to get the rating for a single disk, you'll notice the SSD is faster in everything but the sequential write, where it is beaten by a small factor. (I used my head for this calculation, you've been warned.)
As you can see, there really isn't much to discuss when it comes to performance, the SSD is simply the faster disk, and taking into account that this is a SATA2 disk, just imagine what a SATA3 SSD can accomplish. It looks like the performance HDDs are a time of the past, or at least they're not really worth the buck any more. In my honest opinion, it would be smarter to invest in some lower end HDDs for storage, and never look at high performance disks as the Velociraptor unless you really need them. Even for recording games which is one of the few places where the HDD is preferred, maybe it would be smarter investing in an SSD for the recording, and then transferring the files to a slower HDD at a later time, because that small margin by which the HDDs are faster at sequential write, just isn't worth it in my eyes.
I hope you enjoyed the read if you made it this long. I just got curious when I saw those old files on my computer, and I wanted to share my thoughts. Feedback is welcome, even if it's critical, then I'll just throw my feces after you.
After coming home today after a nice workout, I browsed through some old files on my computer, and I happened to find some performance Ratings from the old drives in my computer.
Now I'm the type of guy who doesn't want to go down on hardware, so my PC is pretty packed. I've got an SSD for my OS, and I'm running two Velociraptors in Raid0 (For the guys who don't know Velociraptors. They are the HDD to buy if you want performance). Lastly I have an old WD HDD labeled with the green tag (Meaning it's complete crap when looking at speeds) for movies, music and all the other things you could imagine me getting from not very legal sites (mostly porn).
I have all the tests from those disks laying around, but since then I've gotten a new intel SSD to replace my old OCZ one.
After looking at the old tests I got curious on how well my newer SSD would stack up against my HDDs and older SSD, so I wanted to do a performance analysis of the disks. Mostly I wanted to find out if the HDDs could still match SSDs in performance especially in the sequential write test, which HDDs should be so good at.
I should mention, that all my disks are running SATA2, as I'm running an older i7 CPU, without compatible motherboards that also support SATA3, which is around twice the speed of SATA2.
With that said, you can expect newer SSDs to surpass my "new" SSD even further when looking at the results.
So lets find out if HDDs can still match SSDs in performance in at least one test (the sequential write for those who've forgotten).
First I'd like to throw up my specs so you can see which hardware I ran the tests on. And also so I can gloat a little bit, because we all know whoever has the best hardware has the best.. hardware, if you get me.
| CPU | RAM | Motherboard | GPU |
| Core i7 960 quad core 3.2Ghz | 12GB 1600Mhz DDR3 | ASUS P6T SE | GTX680 |
For testing I used Crystal Disk Mark.
Now lets start with the results from the most boring test. The Green HDD from WD:
| Sequential Read | Sequential Write | Random Read 512KB | Random Write 512KB | Random Read4KB (QD=1) | Random Write4KB (QD=1) | Random Read 4KB (QD=32) | Random Write 4KB (QD=32) |
| 104.274 MB/s | 99.988 MB/s | 30.262 MB/s | 53.427 MB/s | 0.537 MB/s [ 131.2 IOPS] | 1.001 MB/s [ 244.5 IOPS] | 1.394 MB/s [ 340.2 IOPS] | 0.851 MB/s [ 207.8 IOPS] |
Lets use this as a baseline. If you have no idea how fast this disk is, don't worry it's the super slow of the super slow disks, and if you run a test on your system, and you get worse results, you should probably kill yourself, or get a new HDD, which one you pick is completely up to you.
Now let us take a look at my old OCZ SSD which I used to use as my system disk.
| Sequential Read | Sequential Write | Random Read 512KB | Random Write 512KB | Random Read4KB (QD=1) | Random Write4KB (QD=1) | Random Read 4KB (QD=32) | Random Write 4KB (QD=32) |
| 176.900 MB/s | 29.373 MB/s | 170.331 MB/s | 26.003 MB/s | 16.997 MB/s [ 4149.6 IOPS] | 26.176 MB/s [ 6390.5 IOPS] | 46.335 MB/s [ 11312.1 IOPS] | 25.525 MB/s [ 6231.6 IOPS] |
Now what do we gain from looking at this. Well first off, if you skim the results, you can see that the SSD wins most of the tests against the slow HDD. Actually the HDD is only faster in two test: the sequential Write and the Random Write 512KB (which might be surprising to some of you).
Now you're probably thinking how this HDD I just described as terrible can outperform the wonderful SSD in these tests. Now there is two reasons for this.
The first reason is more about maintenance than anything else. I ran these tests right after I defragmented my HDDs. If you don't know what Defragging is, it's about putting a file together in one place on your drive, so the file is easier to access for the drive. Here is a quick illustration if you don't really understand what I'm saying:
this is a fragmented hard drive. The green represent a file:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
And here is a representation of a defragmented Hard Drive. Again, the green represents a file:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
As you can see, the HDD will have a much easier time accessing the second file than the first, as it doesn't have to move its laser to sectors placed far from each other all the time to read the file, but can just read it in one go.
Defragging does not apply to SSDs the same way it does to HDDs. This is because of the way SSDs work, which I will not get into detail with here. Just know that you should never defrag an SSD, but doing it often to you HDD never hurts.
Now the second reason that old lousy HDD can keep up with the SSD in these two operations is because of the way HDDs are designed compared to SSDs.
The HDD has a disk spinning inside of it, and a laser pointer to read and write from the disk while it's spinning.
The SSD on the other hand, and correct me if I'm wrong experts, sends electricity through itself to the desired sector, and stores the data by imprinting 0s and 1s into silicone. (very simply exdplained).
The HDD has an advantage here because of how it is build. If we take the defragmentation example above, in the second example the laser pointer will simply find the end of the green Is, and start writing over the red Is. This also shows how important it is to defrag your PC.
This also applies to the random write, as if the drive is defragmented the laser will already be at a position where it can easily keep writing, and even though the write operations are random, it can just place them in order from where it already is. It should be taken into consideration that this SSD is an old one, and that it might have taken its told on it. I expect that if this test had been made when it was brand new, the random write test would be closer to that of the HDD.
On newer SSDs this problem doesn't exist any more, as their increasing speeds have made them the faster option, even for random writes.
SSDs are still the overall winner, and the other tests are the ones that really matter when it comes to fast boot times, and quick searches through the disk, which are the ones most commonly used in everyday usage.
I don't want to get into too much detail with the rest of the comparisons as we have more exciting disks to check out.
Now I want to show you guys the other two drives I have left. Lets start with the Raid Velociraptors.
| Sequential Read | Sequential Write | Random Read 512KB | Random Write 512KB | Random Read4KB (QD=1) | Random Write4KB (QD=1) | Random Read 4KB (QD=32) | Random Write 4KB (QD=32) |
| 345.210 MB/s | 331.723 MB/s | 84.147 MB/s | 147.985 MB/s | 1.068 MB/s [ 260.7 IOPS] | 4.835 MB/s [ 1180.3 IOPS] | 5.822 MB/s [ 1421.4 IOPS] | 7.567 MB/s [ 1847.5 IOPS] |
First of, for those that don't know, Raid0 means that these drives work in tandem, and in theory (and almost in practice), this makes them around twice as fast. So if you want the number for a single disk, divide by two.
Those numbers do look pretty impressive though, but if you think that is fancy, wait until you see the performance of my newer single SSD
| Sequential Read | Sequential Write | Random Read 512KB | Random Write 512KB | Random Read4KB (QD=1) | Random Write4KB (QD=1) | Random Read 4KB (QD=32) | Random Write 4KB (QD=32) |
| 272.499 MB/s | 159.941 MB/s | 255.153 MB/s | 156.660 MB/s | 24.418 MB/s [ 5961.4 IOPS] | 70.283 MB/s [ 17159.0 IOPS] | 131.664 MB/s [ 32144.6 IOPS] | 81.460 MB/s [ 19887.6 IOPS] |
Now that is some pretty whack scores, and remember this is one SSD vs two high level HDDs working together. If you divide the numbers from the HDDs by two to get the rating for a single disk, you'll notice the SSD is faster in everything but the sequential write, where it is beaten by a small factor. (I used my head for this calculation, you've been warned.)
As you can see, there really isn't much to discuss when it comes to performance, the SSD is simply the faster disk, and taking into account that this is a SATA2 disk, just imagine what a SATA3 SSD can accomplish. It looks like the performance HDDs are a time of the past, or at least they're not really worth the buck any more. In my honest opinion, it would be smarter to invest in some lower end HDDs for storage, and never look at high performance disks as the Velociraptor unless you really need them. Even for recording games which is one of the few places where the HDD is preferred, maybe it would be smarter investing in an SSD for the recording, and then transferring the files to a slower HDD at a later time, because that small margin by which the HDDs are faster at sequential write, just isn't worth it in my eyes.
I hope you enjoyed the read if you made it this long. I just got curious when I saw those old files on my computer, and I wanted to share my thoughts. Feedback is welcome, even if it's critical, then I'll just throw my feces after you.
