Quote:
Originally Posted by RonindeBeatrice
Yeah, the Green drive is 20 times larger, while the SSD is 10 times faster. The Samsung based Crucial might not have earth shattering random IO, being only several times faster than a mechanical harddrive, but it's sequential speed is also much faster across the entire volume.
There is no comparing a 5400RPM HDD versus a decent SSD.
Edit: I just realized he was talking about the M255. The Indilinx based SSD's are hundreds of times faster than HDDs.
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The problem is that it really depends what you want to
do with a drive that determines how fast it is or otherwise. A sequential read bench only gives you a small part of the picture.
If I am doing fully sequential read work then the SSD is maybe 3 times faster than the mechanical drive. But the write speeds don't show the same difference - unlike an SSD, a mechanical drive reads & writes at pretty much the same speed. So if I need sequential write performance then the SSD is a waste of money, and a mechanical solution is better (as it is much cheaper), even if I don't need more space than the SSD provides.
If all I want is sequential reads, then for a given dollar amount I can usually get better performance from a mechanical array than an SSD.
But if I want any kind of random performance then the SSD completely destroys any mechanical drive, and the price premium is more than worthwhile due to the huge increase in performance.
Obviously if I need a lot of space, then a mechanical array is the only way to go (currently).
The point is that you always need to match your storage build to your usage. This is different to most other areas of computing - a faster gaming gpu is likely to be a faster rendering gpu, a faster cpu for 1 task is likely to be fast in another task also. But with storage, a solution that is terrible for one application can be the best way to go in another situation, and making the wrong choice can be an expensive mistake.
