# SSD speed vs. Velociraptor



## Raw (Feb 12, 2013)

Want to see and feel SSD speed vs. WD Velociraptor in real time?
If you have 2 machines like I do with different drives...

I just grabbed my monthly Windows 7 updates (14 updates) from Microsoft and let me tell you, the Intel Cherryville 180 I have in machine #1 beat my WD Velociraptor in machine #2 by 4-5 times in speed.
I was amazed, it took about a minute on one machine and about 5 minutes on the other.
Both machines are similar in most all respects besides the harddrives.

I never really paid attention to it before but I just happened to boot both machines at the same time and WOW. That's a serious difference.


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## Sasqui (Feb 12, 2013)

Raw said:


> Want to see and feel SSD speed vs. WD Velociraptor in real time?
> If you have 2 machines like I do with different drives...
> 
> I just grapped my monthly Windows 7 updates (14 updates) from Microsoft and let me tell you, the Intel Cherryville 180 I have in machine 1 beat my WD Velociraptor in machine 2 by 4-5 times in speed.
> ...



Not surprised!  Be interested to see some benchmarks, ATTO perhaps.


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## brandonwh64 (Feb 12, 2013)

I still browse newegg for that special 120GB SSD when I get the funds. I am running two WD 500GB Blue drives in raid 0 and while they are fast they are not THAT fast.


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## RejZoR (Feb 12, 2013)

I have a Crucial M4 128GB in my laptop but it feels like it was faster with Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB. Yes, boot is faster and it's totally silent and doesn't generate any heat, but it just feels sluggish sometimes and browser also feels sluggish even though it shouldn't at all.
Weird.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 12, 2013)

SSDs are substantially faster than HDDs but HDDs that don't suffer a mechanical failure (infant mortality) can last a decade reasonably with heavy use.  SSDs, not so much.

Which is better depends on your needs.


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## 3870x2 (Feb 12, 2013)

FordGT90Concept said:


> SSDs are substantially faster than HDDs but HDDs that don't suffer a mechanical failure (infant mortality) can last a decade reasonably with heavy use.  SSDs, not so much.
> 
> Which is better depends on your needs.



I thought HDD life was 5 years average, and SSDs life were longer than that of HDDs due to no moving parts.  Guess I might be wrong.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 12, 2013)

The warranty period usually encompasses the infant mortality phase (fails due to manufacturing defect).  The useful life of the device is usually 2-4 times the length of infant mortality.

I have lots of drives over 7 years old.  In recent memory, I only had one failure and it was infant mortality (warranty covered).  Mind you, they were all warrantied for 5 years to begin with.


It's the write fatigue that is a problem with SSDs.  With heavy writing, you can effectively kill an SSD in a year.  The same writing load on an HDD wouldn't phase it.


...think of it as the same reason we still use tape drives to backup critical data.  They're known to last decades with little to no data loss.


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## caleb (Feb 12, 2013)

I'm good with WD Black's - noisy as hell but does 150MB/s+.


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## Raw (Feb 12, 2013)

*1,200,000 mtbf*



FordGT90Concept said:


> SSDs are substantially faster than HDDs but HDDs that don't suffer a mechanical failure (infant mortality) can last a decade reasonably with heavy use.  SSDs, not so much.
> 
> Which is better depends on your needs.



No kidding? I didn't know that about SSDs and life.
You mean my Intel Cherry 520 Series with a 1,200,000 MTBF rate is worse than my WD Blacks that claim 1,200,000 MTBF? 

Where would the difference be?

Intel claims a MINIMUM of 5 years of 20GB per day writes.
That seems to be an awful lot of writes.

Could you elaborate a bit just for curiosity's sake?


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## kklownboy (Feb 12, 2013)

FordGT90Concept said:


> It's the write fatigue that is a problem with SSDs.  With heavy writing, you can effectively kill an SSD in a year.  The same writing load on an HDD wouldn't phase it.
> 
> 
> ...think of it as the same reason we still use tape drives to backup critical data.  They're known to last decades with little to no data loss.



That would be incorrect.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 12, 2013)

Raw said:


> No kidding? I didn't know that about SSDs and life.
> You mean my Intel Cherry 520 Series with a 1,200,000 MTBF rate is worse than my WD Blacks that claim 1,200,000 MTBF?


The life of SSDs is determined in write operations, not hours.  If an SSD was plugged in and only doing read operations, it probably would last that long before some mechanical component gives way.




Raw said:


> Intel claims a MINIMUM of 5 years of 20GB per day writes.
> That seems to be an awful lot of writes.


It's not.  An SSD that can do 500 MB/s of writes can meet that quota in 40 seconds.




kklownboy said:


> That would be incorrect.
> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm


Oh really?  The highest any SSD (Corsair Force 3) went was just over 1 petabytes in writes and it only took 4 months to make it fail.  It proved my statement.

Edit: Granted, the Corsair Force 3 (520 MB/s) would take over 22 days to write 1 PB of data.  A modest HDD (100 MB/s write) would take over 115 days to write a PB.


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## McSteel (Feb 12, 2013)

...and we all happen do write petabytes upon petabytes to our drives each year...

I'd like to see the response time of individual sectors on an HDD after a petabyte of continuous random writes. And it's S.M.A.R.T. readout.


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## bpgt64 (Feb 12, 2013)

I can run some benches later.  I have 1 Agility 3 for the OS, a 4 SSD Agility 2 Raid, and a 600gb/500gb vrap in N-raid(just grouped together for overall size).


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 12, 2013)

McSteel said:


> ...and we all happen do write petabytes upon petabytes to our drives each year...
> 
> I'd like to see the response time of individual sectors on an HDD after a petabyte of continuous random writes. And it's S.M.A.R.T. readout.


I'm sure several of my drives have over a petabyte of writes but they're all in RAID so I can't get SMART data off them without removing them from the arrays.

The small capacity of SSDs encourages more writes than a high capacity HDD gets (e.g. installing and uninstalling applications as opposed to installing once and leaving them).

Additionally, writes frequently happen due to page file and updating the file system on the volume.


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## Raw (Feb 12, 2013)

*meet that quota in 40 seconds*



FordGT90Concept said:


> The life of SSDs is determined in write operations, not hours.  If an SSD was plugged in and only doing read operations, it probably would last that long before some mechanical component gives way.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Flibolito (Feb 12, 2013)

I was an early adopter of consumer SSD. The Intel x25-M I purchased upon release is still at the same performance as it was day 1, read and write. As far as the real world all the SSDs I owned have lost nothing in performance or reliability. If you really write mega amounts of data to an SSD such as professional or hobby video editing im sure they will degrade after a few years but the speed saves time and money and I'm sure those people would have no problem replacing them after 2 or 3 years for newer products. Just my personal opinion and real world use.


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## kklownboy (Feb 13, 2013)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Oh really?  The highest any SSD (Corsair Force 3) went was just over 1 petabytes in writes and it only took 4 months to make it fail.  It proved my statement.
> 
> Edit: Granted, the Corsair Force 3 (520 MB/s) would take over 22 days to write 1 PB of data.  A modest HDD (100 MB/s write) would take over 115 days to write a PB.


  Uh no.It proves just how durable a SSD is. That test was a torture test.On consumer drives that, nobody would ever do in real life. I would bet that 99.9% of users on this forum will never Write a PB in there entire life. You say you have done that, doing what? Whatever your doing its not what a User would do with a consumer SSD. Been a user of SSD for three gens. Still haven't lost one. Modern SSD with GC and Trim makes it almost full proof.I also have some old HDDs 40GB and 80GB, they still run too, but who would want to hear that loud whine that old HDDs do. Heck even new HDDs have sound. Your worry of SSD failure is overstated. I would never use a HDD for my OS or any app/prog. HDDs are only for storage. SSDs are just too fast not use. Will be great when 1TB SSDs show in a ok price, then storage will be faster than any possible raided HDD.


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## terrastrife (Feb 13, 2013)

caleb said:


> I'm good with WD Black's - noisy as hell but does 150MB/s+.



In the time it takes your black to find the data, an ssd has already loaded it <:

Even my first gen Samsung/Jmicron SSD (these are the original ones that are only like 170MB/80MB) vs my RAID0 Raptors the difference was night and day, even with the stuttering.


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## Raw (Feb 13, 2013)

*Benchmarks*



Sasqui said:


> Not surprised!  Be interested to see some benchmarks, ATTO perhaps.



I am sure there are lots of "benchmarks" out there already, that's not what I meant.
I'm talking "seat of the pants feel", "real time and real world use use", "user can see it and truly appreciate it" stuff. 
Benchmarks have their place of course and give a good indication of what to expect but that's not my point here.
I meant the "Holy Shit" factor.


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## Peter1986C (Feb 13, 2013)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I'm sure several of my drives have over a petabyte of writes but they're all in RAID so I can't get SMART data off them without removing them from the arrays.
> 
> The small capacity of SSDs encourages more writes than a high capacity HDD gets (e.g. installing and uninstalling applications as opposed to installing once and leaving them).
> 
> Additionally, writes frequently happen due to page file and updating the file system on the volume.



I only install apps that do not do excessive writes onto the SSD, and only if I won't un- or reinstall them within 6 months. BOINC, VMWare (and any VM), Firefox (this one just in case), and mTorrent (only for stuff that is legal, the m representing the Greek "muu" (which resembles "u" in shape only)) are all on the Data drive (mechanical HDD).

@Raw: disabling MSDOS-filenames might help as well, speaking in terms of avoiding writes. One way of doing that is using SSDTweaker: http://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=SSD-Tweaker. The Free Edition should be good enough.


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## qubit (Feb 13, 2013)

Raw said:


> Want to see and feel SSD speed vs. WD Velociraptor in real time?
> If you have 2 machines like I do with different drives...
> 
> I just grabbed my monthly Windows 7 updates (14 updates) from Microsoft and let me tell you, the Intel Cherryville 180 I have in machine #1 beat my WD Velociraptor in machine #2 by 4-5 times in speed.
> ...



That's quite something. I really must upgrade to an SSD!


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## terrastrife (Feb 13, 2013)

qubit said:


> That's quite something. I really must upgrade to an SSD!



1 Minute, probably limited to CPU speed as CPU is required for decompressing the archives


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## Raw (Feb 13, 2013)

*Ok and thanks, I'll check it out*



Chevalr1c said:


> I only install apps that do not do excessive writes onto the SSD, and only if I won't un- or reinstall them within 6 months. BOINC, VMWare (and any VM), Firefox (this one just in case), and mTorrent (only for stuff that is legal, the m representing the Greek "muu" (which resembles "u" in shape only)) are all on the Data drive (mechanical HDD).
> 
> @Raw: disabling MSDOS-filenames might help as well, speaking in terms of avoiding writes. One way of doing that is using SSDTweaker: http://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=SSD-Tweaker. The Free Edition should be good enough.



Ok and thanks, I'll check it out.


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## terrastrife (Feb 13, 2013)

Chevalr1c said:


> I only install apps that do not do excessive writes onto the SSD, and only if I won't un- or reinstall them within 6 months. BOINC, VMWare (and any VM), Firefox (this one just in case), and mTorrent (only for stuff that is legal, the m representing the Greek "muu" (which resembles "u" in shape only)) are all on the Data drive (mechanical HDD).
> 
> @Raw: disabling MSDOS-filenames might help as well, speaking in terms of avoiding writes. One way of doing that is using SSDTweaker: http://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=SSD-Tweaker. The Free Edition should be good enough.



You're missing out. SSDs today are rated for 10+GB of writes per day for at least their warranty period (5+ years). Even the Samsung 840 which uses the severely limited TLC Nand is rated for 5GB/day for 3 years minimum.
Unless you got a hectic internet connection for *µ*torrent you won't write or cache anywhere near that, and then you'd be running out of disk capacity anyway.
I've been using my Samsung 64GB since mid 2009 or so, and I write well over 20GB a week to it since then (manual trim). Works out to about 3TB written and still no hiccups. I have a feeling most people would sell/upgrade well before then.


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## Peter1986C (Feb 13, 2013)

Thanks for the input. 

On a sidenote, I used an "m" because:
1) I was too lazy to copy&paste the right letter into my post and 
2) Many people use a "u" there which is wrong.


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## kajson (Feb 13, 2013)

@ raw 

I've got an m4 and was also pretty anxious about saving write cycles from the start, both with an eye on performance and lifespan. I used a couple of steps from the following article, mind you not all of em. 

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size_p3/2941

I took the hibernation file out for space, which most people do. 
And moved most of my userprofile things to the hdd. 
Also i moved the indexing to a normal hdd, which lets you keep the functionality but saves write cycles and space, so win win in my book. 


The only other thing I did, which requires a bit of fiddling to get to work properly, is have firefox cache everything on my download drive instead of on the SSD, which should save loads of writing cycles I'd think. 
This requires a bit of registry tweaking though, google it if you are interested.


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## bpgt64 (Feb 13, 2013)

1 Western Digital Vrap
1 Crucial M4
1 4x120GB Agility 3 raid on Rocket raid 620L controller


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