Ssd or 7,200 rpm. which is faster?

[opexx]

I've never really looked into hard drives much. What's going to be faster on a new build? SSD or a 7,200 rpm sata 3.0gb/s

 

[sminlal]

SSDs are way, way faster, but they're also a lot more expensive on a $/byte basis.

The sweet spot is to buy a relatively small SSD (80GB, for example) to hold the OS and your applications to give you good boot and program startup performance, and a larger hard drive (1TB, for example) for bulk storage.

The following graph is from a recent Anandtech review of SSDs. The last two items on the chart are hard drives, note how poorly they compare to all the SSDs, even the "slow" ones:

 

[opexx]

And just one other thing. I've had hard drives crash on me before, permanently. something about a "sector out of place" or something like that. What are the chances of a SSD crashing on me to the point where I can't restore any data?

 

[sminlal]

SSDs have no moving parts and are entirely electronic, so they've completely eliminated all of the mechanical vulnerabilities of disk drives. I believe that the biggest likelihood of data loss probably stems from the drive firmware, which has to be quite complex in order to effectively manage wear leveling and performance optimization across all of the flash memory cells. For that reason it may be wise to avoid brand new designs or new firmware versions in favour of those that have proven themselves for a least a little while.

SSDs have a limited lifetime in terms of the number of writes they can sustain, Intel claims "at least" 5 years of service at a write rate of 20GB/day. On my Windows 7 system I'm currently seeing 5GB of writing per day, which would translate to a 20-year lifespan.

The data is stored as a series of static charges which do dissipate over time. The information I've seen suggests that you should expect perhaps 10 years before the stored data starts to become unreliable. For this reason I expect to backup/restore my drive once every 5 years or so to ensure that all of the data is freshly re-written to the drive.

 

[opexx]

So all in all if I have the money, I really should get a SSD as my primary rather then a standard 7,200 sata drive?

 

[sminlal]

If you're willing to spend extra money for a "performance" system then an SSD is an excellent investment, IMHO. I personally don't see the sense in buying a really fast multicore CPU if it's going to spend a lot of it's time waiting for the disk drive to move it's heads back and forth.

Here's a video I made comparing the time to boot Windows 7 and start Firefox on a hard drive vs. an SSD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTHX0MqVMss

 

[cadder]

It depends a lot on what you will be doing with your machine. A machine with an SSD will boot a lot faster, and it will loads apps faster, but it might not do other things much faster. You might be better off using that money in other parts of your system.

We have 3 nearly identical machines at work, but one has an SSD. Running AutoCAD and Revit we really don't see any speed difference in daily use.

 

[swifty_morgan]

You could try your 7200rpm high capacity HD and the get one of these...

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1361/1/

 

[creyes3]

how you will compare a ssd to a new hdd with sata 3 (6gbs) ?

Thanks in advance

 

[apache_lives]

1) like any storage device, BACKUP YOUR DATA
2) any SSD is quicker then any HDD
3) google is your friend

 

[sminlal]

how you will compare a ssd to a new hdd with sata 3 (6gbs) ?

To repeat what's already been said: hard drives don't go any faster with 6Gbit/sec SATA. The bottleneck is in the mechanics of the hard drive, not in the connection speed.

A typical SSD has access times that are about 100X faster than a standard 7200RPM hard drive, and transfer rates that are somewhere around twice as fast.

 

[Nexis3]

It depends a lot on what you will be doing with your machine. A machine with an SSD will boot a lot faster, and it will loads apps faster, but it might not do other things much faster. You might be better off using that money in other parts of your system.

We have 3 nearly identical machines at work, but one has an SSD. Running AutoCAD and Revit we really don't see any speed difference in daily use.

does this still hold true? We are looking at getting some new machines for running AutoCAD...Thanks for any insight.

 

[cadder]

does this still hold true? We are looking at getting some new machines for running AutoCAD...Thanks for any insight.

I have contemplated building myself a new AutoCAD workstation. This time I would use a 120GB SSD for the boot drive. I think the SSD should be faster and I wonder if I did not do a good job of testing the previous machines, and there is more information available now about how to set up an SSD. Plus SSD's are significantly less expensive now so I could justify it much easier for a new build.

 

[igorroza]

Since R14, Autocad was never lagging on any machine in the past but it opens up much faster with SSD. We use Autocad MEP 2013 so it has a lot of stuff to load each time and on computer with HDD it was really taking some time. Revit also loads much faster. Starting a program is the most noticeable and comparable, more than actual work. But since Revit works on local drive even if you store projects on the network, than it has to be faster on SSD. In reality, besides starting programs, I never noticed significant speed improvements but it is typical case when upgrading. I'm sure that when I sit down at another station with HDD, I will be surprised how slow it is. Anyway, I don't see any lagging in Revit now, it's unbelievable how fast you get used to good stuff. The improvement is not a Wow! but I don't see a reason to save a few bucks (stretch that extra cost over 2-3 years of using this machine) to get more useless storage if you have network. In todays CAD, and it always been, speed is what we need. I'm very happy, not excited but happy that my new computer has SSD.

 

[arensisna]

Wow Great Thanks in advance

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