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Some realworld data for SSD vs. HDD

by: John -
More On: Spanning the Net
Chuck and I had a discussion about solid state hard drives versus traditional platter driven hard drives not too long ago. While it would seem SSDs should have a leg up on HDDs in terms of performance and stability, we've seen articles and discussions stating this isn't so. ComputerWorld took two SSDs and pitted them against a few Seagates and the results show that SSDs are usually the same or slower than regular hard drives. On bootup, one of the SSDs was a few seconds faster while the other one booted up the same time as the regular hard drives. On reboot, the Crucial SSD took about 20 seconds longer to come back to life than the regular hard drives. Copying 8GB of data to the SSDs took 60 to 80 seconds longer than regular HDDs but the SSDs did win by a slight margin over the fastest 7200RPM HDD in the test with a 30 second gap between the fastest solid state drive over the slowest regular hard drive. What does this really mean? In my view, it means the SSD option still needs a lot of work to be really worth the investment.