Question Can a HDD be faster than an SSD?

[jhuju]

What happens if the transfer rate of an HDD is faster than an SSD? Will the HDD be faster?
What traits make an SSD better than an HDD, other than faster IOPS and faster write/read speed?

 

[kanewolf]

What happens if the transfer rate of an HDD is faster than an SSD? Will the HDD be faster?
What traits make an SSD better than an HDD, other than faster IOPS and faster write/read speed?

Besides the two primary performance defining characteristics?
Rotational delay. SSDs have zero.

 

[jhuju]

Besides the two primary performance defining characteristics?
Rotational delay. SSDs have zero.

Does that mean that if an SSD and an HDD have the same speed, the SSD will be faster?

 

[USAFRet]

Does that mean that if an SSD and an HDD have the same speed, the SSD will be faster?

Think of it as teleportation.

Drive to work, or step into the Star Trek transporter to get to work.

SSD has near zero seek rate for the next data.
HDD has to drive there.

 

[kanewolf]

Does that mean that if an SSD and an HDD have the same speed, the SSD will be faster?

Yes. Say the HDD finishes reading 1/5 the way around the disk. It has to wait up to 4/5 the rotation speed to read the next requested data. Then there is seek time. That is moving the read heads across the surface of the disk. An SSD has neither of those things. That is the "driving" time that @USAFRet refers to above.

 

[geofelt]

The only real advantage that a HDD has compared to a ssd is cost per gigabyte.
I can't think of a HDD that has a faster data transfer rate than the cheapest ssd.
In random I/o, any ssd will be some 30x faster than even a 10K HDD

When writing, in some situations you can get better performance with a HDD.
A HDD is a good device for backups and storage.

 

[CountMike]

What happens if the transfer rate of an HDD is faster than an SSD? Will the HDD be faster?
What traits make an SSD better than an HDD, other than faster IOPS and faster write/read speed?

Not with modern SSDs, some older ones were close in copying large files but that was more than 10 years ago. Greatest advantage of SSD is seek time that is almost instant but also that SSDs read and write thru 4 channels and HDDs one. Also short delay in positioning "Heads", HDDs do it mechanically and in SSDs are just virtual. For smaller files disk RAM cache is more beneficial for HDDs , larger is better so RAM would also be used to large extent. HDDs never exceeded SATA bandwidth but SSDs are hampered by it, often reading and writing faster than SATA could process, That's why NVME and PCIe interface is much faster than SATA. Higher (faster) version PCIe also give better NVME performance.