SSD vs. HDD - practical comparison - Jul 5, 2015
Description:
I bet you have already heard about an SSD or solid state drive and how fantastic it seems to be. Is it really worth the price?
This project is a practical comparison of an SSD (solid state drive) and 3.5" HDD (hard disk drive). Even though most SSDs are in the 2.5" format I didn't take into consideration 2.5" HDDs,
mainly because they are a lot slower than 3.5" hard disk drives.
Let's start from a few undeniable facts about both competitors.
| Characteristic | SSD | HDD |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Fast | Slow |
| Noise | Completely noiseless | May be noisy, especially while reading |
| Reliability | If it's about to fail, it usually dies without any warning and your computer won't recognize the drive any more. You probably won't be able to recover even one file at home. | If it's about to fail, you can sometimes notice something bad is happening to the drive. It may click at times, or a few of your files are inaccessible, missing or corrupted. Some other time your operating system may not boot and show you an error like “disk boot failure - insert system disk and press Enter”. In many such cases you can simply copy most of your files and folders to another hard drive. If you're unlucky and the electronics fries, your drive will be completely inaccessible. |
| Power consumption | Low | High |
| Capacity | Low - up to 1TB | High - up to 4TB |
| Price | High - about 8 times more expensive per 1GB of space than HDD | Low - about 8 times cheaper per 1GB of space than SSD |
Speed tests:
For the purpose of this comparison I created partitions of the same size on both drives: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD and WD Black 1TB HDD and installed Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10074 on each drive. Both drives went through a series of real life and synthetic speed tests. I gathered all the results in the tables below.
Real life tests:
| Test description | SSD | HDD | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows installation time | 12:55 min | 24:58 min | SSD is 93% faster |
| Boot time 1) | 12 s | 48 s | SSD is 300% faster |
| Data copying 2) | 2:03 min | 4:38 min | SSD is 126% faster |
| Data compression 3) | 13:26 min | 13:36 min | SSD is 1% faster |
| GIMP installation time | 52 s | 56 s | SSD is 8% faster |
| GIMP start time | 11 s | 19 s | SSD is 73% faster |
| Blender installation time | 35 s | 40 s | SSD is 14% faster |
| Blender start time | 5 s | 9 s | SSD is 80% faster |
1) In each boot time test I started my stopwatch when the "Verifying DMI Pool Data......" message disappeared from the screen and stopped when the desktop appeared
2) 11GB of data (1200 files in 59 folders)
3) 2.04GB of data (472 files in 14 folders)
Benchmark tests:
| AS SSD Benchmark 1.8.5611.39791 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Test description | SSD | HDD | Winner |
| Seq (read) | 260.28 MB/s | 120.25 MB/s | SSD is 116% faster |
| 4K (read) | 20.38 MB/s | 0.65 MB/s | SSD is 3059% faster |
| 4K-64Thrd (read) | 551.59 MB/s | 1.50 MB/s | SSD is 36796% faster |
| Acc.time (read) | 0.166 ms | 12.738 ms | SSD is 7596% faster |
| Seq (write) | 211.57 MB/s | 116.23 MB/s | SSD is 82% faster |
| 4K (write) | 48,79 MB/s | 1.18 MB/s | SSD is 4052% faster |
| 4K-64Thrd (write) | 132.67 MB/s | 1.09 MB/s | SSD is 12072% faster |
| Acc.time (write) | 0,063 ms | 3.116 ms | SSD is 4845% faster |
| CrystalDiskMark 4.0.3 x64 | |||
| Test description | SSD | HDD | Winner |
| Seq Q32T1 (read) | 283.85 MB/s | 128.95 MB/s | SSD is 120% faster |
| 4K Q32T1 (read) | 134.85 MB/s | 1.798 MB/s | SSD is 7400% faster | Seq (read) | 254.3 MB/s | 134.1 MB/s | SSD is 90% faster |
| 4K (read) | 26.08 MB/s | 0.705 MB/s | SSD is 3602% faster |
| Seq Q32T1 (write) | 231 MB/s | 130.75 MB/s | SSD is 77% faster |
| 4K Q32T1 (write) | 123.25 MB/s | 1.862 MB/s | SSD is 6519% faster | Seq (write) | 216,95 MB/s | 132.2 MB/s | SSD is 64% faster |
| 4K (write) | 68.1 MB/s | 1.476 MB/s | SSD is 4513% faster |
The OCZ Vertex 4 was faster than WD Black in every single test. It's worth mentioning that my motherboard is equipped with just SATA2 ports. The results could be even a lot better if I had SATA3. Even worse about hard disk drives is the fact that their performance degrades over time due to file fragmentation, while solid state drives don't have this problem at all.
Conclusion:
At this point I should reveal the winner, so my verdict is... a tie. SSDs and HDDs differ a lot, but there is enough room on the market for both technologies, at least for now.
The SSD is a much better choice for a system drive, where you install the operating system and all or most needed programs. You can add more RAM, buy a new processor and the
performance boost in everyday use may be barely noticeable. When you add an SSD as a system drive, it usually feels like your computer got a new life. Your OS and programs
start a lot faster and the system is much more responsive. It works the same way even for much older computers, so if you need an upgrade, the SSD is a wise choice. My PC is
8 years old and thanks to the SSD it's a lot faster than one might expect.
The HDD is still the best way to store large amounts of data, like videos, photos, music, backup copies and much more. Your valuable files should be a little bit safer
and you won't spend a fortune for a 1 or 2TB drive.
Test PC specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 5400+ 2.80GHz
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-M56S-S3
RAM: Aeneon DDR2-800 CL4 4GB
GPU: Asus Radeon R7 250
PSU: CHIEFTEC 450W