Why upgrade to a solid state hard drive on desktop computer if non-solid state hard drive speed = 6GB/s and solid state hard drive speed = 6GB/s
Will I just be paying more to get less space? they both claim to have the same speed. I know SSD will use less power, make no sound and will be harder to damage if you drop them. But if I plan on placing a hard drive on a desktop computer why should I consider using a SSD?
Best Answer
The storage subsystem consists of a (large) number of technologies which together perform the IO tasks of the computer. These technologies are linked together, and the speed of the system is determined by the slowest link in the chain: the bottleneck. The 6Gbps SATA speed you see mentioned there is the measurement of one part of this chain, the drive's external interface. But not the slowest part. Neither solid state drives nor hard drives can actually saturate the interface. Solid state drives do come a lot closer to saturating the interface link in the chain than hard drives do. The performance difference between the slowest links in the chain for hard drives and solid state drives is huge.
Here are some benchmarks of my hard drive and SSD. You can see a quite big difference. This first one is of my hard drive:
And this one is of my SSD:
Both of these have the same SATA 3Gbps interface. Despite that you can see quite significant differences in measured performance, specially in Random Read 4KB (QD=32).