SSD VS Fastest 15k rpm hard drive?

[crspyjohn]

SSD VS Fastest 15k rpm hard drive?

Which one is faster? I been on slickdeals on this thread http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=438800 I'm pretty sure I'm right but I'm not so sure. I thought the write/read speeds don't really matter on these things?

Anyone can chime in?

[Serra]

SSD wins hands down. There's no competition. SSD drives have a seek time of effectively zero (compared at least to drives with platters) and can transfer rates at, well, either the speed of the bus they're attached to or the speed their memory is designed to work at, whichever is slower. I'm not saying you *couldn't* find a horrible SSD drive from some knockoff manufacturer somewhere, but they should win in every way.

[nn_step]

SSD has superior latency and power usage; however it costs more, Currently has lower bandwidth, and the low end is expected to only last 3-5 year depending on number of writes. Page files are something you don't want on a flash disk because it uses up reads/writes like crazy, thus some highier end models are going to include an alternate Storage medium, such as Dram/T1/SRAM depending on Cost and performance desires. NAND being the cheapest form for storage will probably be the most common used.

[Drag]

whats sdd? an interface?

[koensa]

solid state disks i think

instead of using a motor and magnetic platters and heads to write and read date,
it all will be replaced with "chips"

see it like a big USB stick with sata and nice speeds

[Drag]

how fast? does it beats sas?

[eddieate]

how fast? does it beats sas?

Well SAS isn't actually a method of storage so an SSD drive can't really 'beat' it.
I assume you mean can an SSD drive beat a SCSI drive when both are attached over a serial interface?
Which is essentially the OP's question, to which the answer is 'It Depends'
although an SSD drive could be considered 'faster' because of its minuscule seek time but as nn_step pointed out you can get more bandwidth from a SCSI solution.
Also there's reliability, cost and application...
Ed.

[epion2985]

how fast? does it beats sas?

SAS isn't a drive technology its just an interface.

If you are referring to 15k sas drives then let me point this out.

Magnetic platter drive seek times are in MILI seconds
Solid state memory seek times are in NANO seconds

Your ram is solid state memory, as a performance storage it normally can't be even touched, but there are some other "issues" like you need it powered all the time or you loose the data on it (hence the battery in i-ram), its expensive, etc.

[Drag]

like i need fast acces times, if it doesn't have a faster read/write rate than i'd rather have sas

[Serra]

like i need fast acces times, if it doesn't have a faster read/write rate than i'd rather have sas


Please note:
SAS isn't a drive technology its just an interface.

[epion2985]

I believe the "read/write" as you are referring to them are access times. There are two thing, access times and bandwidth. I think what was meant is 15k drives have better bandwidth vs SSD, but I can't comment as I don't know myself weather thats true.

If you are doing things like rendering, multi media, encoding/transcoding, burning dvd's etc then you want bandwidth as those are mostly linear patterns, games on the other hand usually display high rates of short and random accesses, where I think timings would be what you are after. Hence why people use raptors for gaming, because they are very responsive.

You should be familiar with the following experience. You run out of ram in a game due to memory leaks etc and your computer hits up your page file, what happens, things slow down and get a little ugly. If that is any indication of anything to me its that SSD are untouchable by magnetic plate drives when it comes to gaming anyway.

[Drag]

Still people don't buy raptors because they have fast acces times because they don't. acteally sas drives have faster seek times. but then again i don't even look at seek times because there useless. you woulden't notice the difference between 1ms. you'd be better off with faster internet

[Serra]

Still people don't buy raptors because they have fast acces times because they don't. acteally sas drives have faster seek times. but then again i don't even look at seek times because there useless. you woulden't notice the difference between 1ms. you'd be better off with faster internet

SAS drives are *not* necessarily faster than *anything*. That's like saying a socket 775 processor is faster than anything else. Sure, Conroes are faster than s939 AMD processors clock-for-clock, but socket 775 Prescotts were not.

It's the same with SAS. Yes, SCSI drives are typically faster, but they can have a number of interfaces, and SAS does not even have the highest max theoretical throughput. Even U320 SCSI drives (which have been out longer) have a higher maximum theoretical throughput (20MBps better, actually). But why does it not matter? Because either way the drives don't use up all the bandwidth available to them, and the internal drives themselves *can be the same device*, it's just the *connector* which is different.

Please, at least start saying SCSI instead of SAS. It's still somewhat inaccurate, but a little less so.

Edit: And that's not to even mention the cost. The cheapest SAS drive NewEgg has is is a 36GB drive for $258 US.

[ak_47_boy]

SSD wins in latency. 15K wins in read/wright speeds simply because of raid. There are databases out there that have transfer speads in the terabyte per second range.

[Serra]

SSD wins in latency. 15K wins in read/wright speeds simply because of raid. There are databases out there that have transfer speads in the terabyte per second range.

What about the fact that you can make RAID arrays of Solid State Disks?

The argument that one type of disk is better than another because you're using multiple disk A's and only 1 disk B is just fundamentally wrong when nothing about disk B suggests it cannot be used in conjunction with other drives of the same type.

[nn_step]

SSD wins in latency. 15K wins in read/wright speeds simply because of raid. There are databases out there that have transfer speads in the terabyte per second range.
true but there are also high end SSD drives that have bandwidth in the 10s of Terabytes, it costs more but if the bandwidth is worth it; then there isn't much more of a choice