Fast Hard Drive?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by gnome, Oct 16, 2007.

  1. gnome

    gnome

    #11     Oct 16, 2007
  2. GTS

    GTS

    Depends what you are doing with them, the read times are fast and the access times blow away any mechanical hard drives.

    If you want to compare performance aspects of different drives why don't you just go to StorageReview.com?
     
    #12     Oct 16, 2007
  3. gnome

    gnome

    You sure those benches apply in the real world? Whenever I copy folders of data from hard drive to a USB flash drive, it's lots slower than copying to another hard drive or even a different folder on the same drive. And SSDs are just bigger flash drives.
     
    #13     Oct 16, 2007
  4. Agree. Raptors are definately faster in day to day use.
     
    #14     Oct 16, 2007
  5. Flash totally owns hard drives in every way except price, and even that's changing fast.

    USB flash drives aren't designed for performance. For one thing, USB is dog slow. A purpose built flash drive on a proper IO bus is a totally different animal.

    Martin
     
    #15     Oct 16, 2007
  6. gnome

    gnome

    In spite of your conviction for SSD, I've yet to read a review which claims they are as fast as magnetic drives... but I'll keep an open ear. The below is from a Wiki page about advantages and disadvantage of SSDs....

    "... Limited write cycles. Typical Flash storage will typically wear out after 100,000-300,000 write cycles, while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer). Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, rather than rewriting files in place. [3]

    "...Slow random write speeds - as erase blocks on SSDs generally are quite large, they're far slower than conventional disks for random writes [4]..."

    And from a Cybernet article...

    "... Here are some of the things that may not be so lovable about solid state drives.

    * Price - Currently around $25 per GB compared to about $0.25 per GB for mechanical drives.
    * Slower write time - Around 18 MB/s compared to over 50 MB/s for hard drives.
    * Lower recoverability - After an SSD fails it is nearly impossible to recover any of the data.
    * Vulnerable - An abrupt powerloss, magnetic fields and electric/static charges could have more of an effect on an SSD compared to normal HDD’s.
     
    #16     Oct 16, 2007
  7. Something to remember about Raptors (if you care) is that they are noisy little suckers compared with slower drives.
     
    #17     Oct 16, 2007
  8. get the new seagate 7200.11's very very fast. 100MB/s sustained transfer. Better yet, get 3 of them and put them on raid 5, speed + redundancy.
     
    #18     Oct 16, 2007
  9. GTS

    GTS

    New SSD from Samsung:

    http://www.fastsilicon.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=333&Itemid=60

    Samsung Reveals High-performance 64 GB SATA II SSDs
    Monday, 05 November 2007

     
    #19     Nov 7, 2007
  10. gnome

    gnome

    These will be FAB when they no longer cost 1 arm + 1 leg.
     
    #20     Nov 7, 2007