Does anybody still use mechanical hard drives?

Disagree with you? Just try one then YOU will understand the difference Become enlightened!

There is a very noticeable difference between SSD and HDD performance. The main difference is maintenance. A HDD does need to be maintained to keep reasonable performance and snappiness. A SSD doesn't. It will always respond the same and respond faster than the HDD ever will.

On my wife's HDD based laptop right now that is very well maintained (by me lol) and it just doesn't compare to the samsung 470 in my M15x which isn't even a new drive.

That said I won't knock their reliability and build quality. I still run my old 7K500 500GB drive as secondary in the ODD drive and it still works as new. Quiet and quick to transfer files. Had it for years.

 

You just hit a very important part....the maintaining is done by you...how many others forget or put off maintaining their SSD probably alot more then you would guess. So that is the problem it's not you but the real owner of the computer if they don't do the maintanence themselves SSD will have a short lifespan and from what I read NAND has a limited read/write lifespan that to me isn't a good incentive to use SSD for a O/S drive as I do alot of imaging and reimaging restore and that will wear out a NAND faster then a HDD for everyday usage. Why because get infected and you guess it you need to wipe the drive clean to restore functions and do this enough if the NAND story has teeth to it then it will not last as one might expect it to last. Sure HDD take it sweet time to load but then again speed isn't everything to using a computer with enough RAM and Processor speed that more then makes up for the difference your going to see in everyday computing since then the RAM and processor plays a more important role with the SSD or HDD as 3rd party to the productivity and storage and retrieval. But for me Capacity is more of a priority then speed - speed does no good if you can't get your productivity done in efficient manner. IMO

 

I have yet to have an SSD that is so slow via NAND wear. I recently reimaged my Clevo W860CU (I had the same Win7 image for 3+ years) and boy a fresh install does a number on SSD responsiveness. The only thing I would do is reducing the pagefile if you have a ridiculous amount of RAM (mostly for space saved) and turning off hibernation (takes 5 seconds to turn it off in CMD). Yes TLC does have "lower" life than MLC/SLC, but honestly it'll last longer than mechanical hard drives, and it'll still take years for the wear to happen.

 

He was also talking about maintaining the HDD based computer, not the SSD.


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If I could have only one, it would be a 1TB 7200rpm mechanical drive. Because I need the space and SSDs would cost too much for that size. Also Windows has improved the boot times over the years, so Win 8.1 boots pretty fast, I know because I have used it that way. Also sequential access is pretty fast on a 7200rpm 1tb driver.

But my laptop has room for two sata drives, and two msata, and a optical drive. So I have the 1TB 7200rpm drive with a 250GB SSD drive.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...0497-samsung-840-120gb-endurance-testing.html

You have to abuse a SSD for quite a long time to wear it out.

 

I have a Samsung EVO 840 to replace my 1tb mechanical drive and an M.2 128gb as extra storage on my laptop. I utilize an external hard drive enclosure for the mechanical drive solely as a means for all my music and backups. Regardless of "improved windows boot time" or how well a mechanical drive is maintained, no mechanical drive I have seen (even the raptors at 10K rpm), even in a raid array, can touch the performance difference on a decent SSD.

 

I only have an HDD. I want to get an SSD, but since my laptop is 3 years old I have to decide whether I want to focus on prolonging the life of this one (by replacing the slow HDD) or wait until I have to get a new computer sometime in a year or so.

I'm thinking the best thing would be to get a 240 GB drive and use a secondary HDD w/ drive caddy. Deals seem to be bringing SSDs down to nearly $0.50/GB, so it may be a good time to take the plunge. Still, I'm a little hesitant for some reason.

 

You misread dude. I maintain my wife's laptop's HDD. The SSD is in my laptop and needs 0 maintenance. I am surprised. I thought the fact that SSD's don't need maintenance was more or less common knowledge.

Also you post makes no sense. You speak about efficiency. Efficiency on a computer is speed. The time it takes to boot, open programs, complete tasks....this = higher efficiency and therefore productivity vs a HDD based machine.

HDD's aren't done yet but their role is mass storage now.

Seems there really are a number of ignoramus's out there!! I think it is high time we head back to the original topic and question!

 

At least you know how to use punctuation (and ellipses don't count).


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Really and all my times with laptop HDD and desktop HDD the only failures I got was from lifespan of the drive finally dying and not from abusing the drive or bad maintenance. So SSD stories of success is cherry picking at the best.

Based on? Yeah facebook, email, twitter yeah that really improves my efficiency on your compute-more rosy dreams here. More RAM and Faster processor does more then a SSD could ever must. Without either of those two you got a expensive paper weight doing nothing but collect dust.

Really based on??? nothing but speculations...and rosy pictures...if that was so true why is HDD still available? Not only storage.

I love this one this is really rich...name calling now that really shows one character and using the lowest common denominator to abuse other posters. This must be why your the only one that maintains the laptop. You colors really show here just keep it coming would ya.

 

No you have a right to know your money is worth something not something they want you to buy remember when a SSD does go out it goes out but unlike a platter you can at least recover before all is lost. IMO And cost to beneifts hasn't yet to be meet concretely by SSD except those wanting to sell and make profit. When most people just facebook and twitter and email or youtube that doesn't require Drive capacity it requires RAM/CPU to do those task.

 

Those are very demanding tasks. I had to OC my desktop to 4.6GHz to view 1080P YouTube videos, and need to upgrade my RAM to 32GB to be able to load up a twitter feed. My AW 14 can't even load up a web page on Chrome without running out of RAM. Good thing my SSD lets me load up error message faster. /s

You're grasping for straws here with your arguments.

 

lol x 10lols

 

umm 12TB SSDs mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm too bad it's all TLC can't torrent without worrying about the SSD which sucks.

 

You thought you posted a witty reply but you completely missed the point. Facebook, twitter, email, and youtube performance isn't dependent on your hard drive. A 1TB SSD or a 40GB HDD aren't going to see much difference while doing those tasks.

 

I made that sarcastic post because his posts don't have a sound argument. Those tasks he mentioned can be ran on a Celeron, so citing them as a reason to spend more money on CPU and RAM instead of a SSD is laughable.

 

To me, it boils down to two issues:

a) Inability to retrieve data from a dead SSD. Having seen a couple of them go "poof" in the most dramatic manner, I'm not too keen on having any amount of valuable data on a machine with a SSD as the only drive.

b) One's personal standpoint - as well as the physical setup of their laptop - whether pictures, music and similar stuff really need to be stored on SSD. My personal answer to this question is "no", but to each their own.

My $0.02 only...

 

I agree with Wattser93's original post, but in the above quotes; you're both wrong.

The performance of the storage subsystem can make a difference with the stated workloads and those same workloads will also suck on a Celeron (depending on which one we're talking about).


What you guys keep forgetting over and over is that a component doesn't stand on it's own: it is part of a system.

The optimum balance of that system is what makes the whole greater than the parts.

The fastest SSD (PCIe based, even) will suck on an AMD APU such as an E350.

The current Intel platforms feel no different than 5 year old systems if you put a 4TB 5400 RPM HDD inside or otherwise cripple them with 4/8GB RAM or an O/S that has it's roots from another century.

Balance has been, is and always will be the key to optimum performance from any given system. Not simply concentrating on a single component within.


CPU+RAM=Work done.

The CPU initially gets it's (new) data from the storage subsystem; if that system is slow; the CPU is starved and performance plummets like a locomotive on the sea.

RAM is where the work is done; NO O/S we have today can use a storage subsystem to do the work it needs to deliver the results asked of it.

The more RAM we have installed, the less dependent the workflow is on the storage subsystem (to page out data it can't hold in RAM anymore) while work is being performed.


Are you starting to see the pattern? The storage subsystem, depending on the specific workflow we're concentrating on, can be the biggest bottleneck to performance.


When it is; nothing else will make the system faster.


I think reading the following post again may help drive this point home:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...use-mechanical-hard-drives-3.html#post9550071

 

Yeah keep those points coming Celeron I like you to use a Celeron and come back to tell us Youtube playback is what you will live by. You either haven't used a Pent or Celeron and compared those to a Duo 2 core or Quad higher Intel. Why do you think Celeron is no longer used easy...to slow of technology that can't process all the massive amount of data need to run web sites anymore that is why. How you can be sarcastic and missed this technology leap and why they created newer faster processor for is your loss or better why don't you go back and use your Celeron since a Celeron is all you need.

 

You said "Spend money on CPU/RAM, that what's necessary for Twitter, Facebook, daily computing, etc...". I said "Those can be done on any cheap processor and RAM so they're a bad example to use".

Your posts are turning into incoherent walls of text.

I was using a Core 2 Duo laptop up until a couple months ago. I had no issues with HD YouTube or Twitch streams. The Internet is not as demanding as you make it out to be. Adblock is fantastic.

 

I have a 2009 HP Mini TU1000, which is my travel netbook and repair laptop (for when the everything else fails). Its been kicked around over 4 continents, dropped in puddles, you name it. If there was a case of voided warranty, its this thing.

It 'boasts' a massive 1GHz Atom (smaller than most smartphones these days), and a whopping 1GB of RAM. Add to that the incredibly hard life its had, and it should be on the scrap heap. But browses, loads skype, plays music and videos and runs data recovery programs without breaking a sweat; all with older gear and lower specs than an iPhone.



I think this tech society is stuck in a cycle of 'the next newest and best thing'. What worked in 2009 still works now, and works well. You don't need massively complex rigs or huge quantities of RAM to happily run web browsers and the like.

Sorry for getting a little away from the topic, but I've always thought it interesting that most people feel that to achieve things, you must have a massive amount of power and so on.


I'd like to think my plucky, battered, all but worthless HP Mini proves that is not always the case.




And getting back to the thread at hand, I use SSDs in my XPS (workstation) and use a shelf of HDDs for long term storage. Its much easier to recover data in my experience from a magnetic disk than it is from a chip, and for archived items that need to be stored for years and called upon infrequently, I'd never trust that kind of data storage to an SSD.

On the other hand, SSDs are the best disk for frequent use, such as OS, page files or program data that needs to be accessed regularly and at high speeds.

Can't beat the start up time for a computer running on an SSD, its just so much better than a HDD. But, both have their place.



tl;dr = I completely understand, continue with your life D

 

I still use a 7200RPM 1TB WD Blue on my desktop.
I've been well aware of SSD's but I plan on making the change all at once. SSDs are deflating, and I've had my eye on the Samsung 840 Pro series.

 

Be careful with Samsung gear, it can be a rip off.


For instance, when I went to buy my OS SSD at 256GB, it was a toss up between the Samsung Pro series and the Sandisk Ultra+.

Here in NZ, the 840 Pro was about $100-120 NZD more than the Sandisk depending on where you went.

Here are the stats for both of the 256GB SSD's.

Read: 840 Pro= 540mb/s, Ultra+ = 530 mb/s

Write: 840 Pro= 520mb/s, Ultra+ = 445 mb/s

Random Write IOPS: 840 Pro= 90K, Ultra+ = 39K


Now while the read and write times are very close together, the IOPS is ridiculously fast in the Samsung. Maybe even worth the extra $100NZD, in my case.

Or is it?

MB/s is an internationally recognised standard for the measurement of data being written to and read from the drive. In essence, calculations over time.

So what about IOPS? Well, I decided to read up on it before handing over my hard earned cash a got a bit of a shock; IOPS is NOT an internationally classified or measured standard, its entirely down to the benchmark tests that each SSD manufacturer comes up to measure the Input Output (operations) Per Second; NOT the same as our favourite MB/s standard.

Essentially, when a manufacturer creates a benchmark test to measure the I/O for their device, the IOPS value is their measurement/ interpretation of those figures.


Heres the link to a very good article that I stole some facts from for this post, and a good explanation of IOPS and how to treat it; as a meaningless, arbitrary number unless such things as latency and I/O size are taken into account.

An explanation of IOPS and latency | Recovery Monkey


Overclock.com and other forums with SSD users have posed questions about the real world results of having nice big IOPS figures, or more than the next guy and basically, the consensus is there is no overwhelmingly better experience to be had with with an SSD that has 51K higher IOPS than the next, even though it might seem obvious that it should.


In case I didn't say any of that clearly enough, I'll give a car metaphor (I'm a car guy).


Engine power = BHp or Break Horsepower (now usually calculated in Kilowatts).
However BHp and Kw are a measure of the same thing. MB/s and IOPS are NOT.

If MB/s is BHp in an engine, then IOPS is the amount of torque the gearbox produces. Somewhat related to each other, but definitely not a measure of the same thing.


At the end of the day, I bought the Sandisk. It has the same controller that Toshiba developed, and has been extremely reliable and fast. Paying an extra $100NZD for slightly faster write times, and a bigger magical IOPS number seemed silly and a case of branding.


tl;dr Sandisk writes slightly slower than Samgsung 840 Pro and has a lower IOPS value (although this number should be treated with extreme caution and not treated as deciding factor).

Go with measuring standards that are fixed, easy to understand and internationally regulated/ calculated. Proprietary measurements of performance should always be taken with a grain of salt.


Happy hunting!

 

actually I'd disagree. having my profile on a SSD is quite a bit slower than having it cached on ram disk, or ram in general which is what I have for my firefox. the snapyness of ram compared to SSD and to HDD is huge. having play youtube videos, websites with heavy scripts and heavy activex or flash will have huge difference. I can't stand not having my cache files placed in ram anymore, it simply makes so much difference even when compared to SSD in raid 0, two or 3 SSDs.

 

How much RAM do you have? I didn't think about this. I'll have to try it.

 

I have to say I just was messing with a system with an SSD boot drive, but 1TB 5400RPM laptop HDD for storage, and loading Battlefield 4 levels too FOREVER. I mean all the points were taken in conquest levels by the time I entered a level, where with SSD I would load up and be one of the first out of the gate.

I also set browser cache to RAM. There's no reason to have it cache to disk any more.

 

As the owner of such a setup:

Alt-tab and do other stuff while it loads, it's not that long.

 

I could not disagree more. Any time I spend loading the map while the enemy team is playing is a loss of positional advantage.

 

I just installed a Seagate 500GB hybrid HDD in one of my family's computers; it's a respectable upgrade over the 320GB hard drive it replaced (faster opening programs, booting up and so on). It's somewhere in between HDD and SSD performance at a price point very much closer to standard HDDs. It seems to be whisper quiet too.

As I said in a previous post, I'd go all SSD if not for cost.

 

I got 16gb but you don't need that much for cache files.. normally i'd say 512mb to 1gb cache is enough unless you like to keep your browser open for a very very long time. I also have all of my profile in ramdisk too. using around 12gb of ram into ramdisk..

 

I'm also intrigued about this.


You reckon by caching a small amount of RAM for the web browser, it will improve performance? How does one go about setting this up? I've 12GB DDR3 RAM, but my system uses about 2 at idle and maybe 6-8 on load, so I figure theres enough overhead for something like this.

Could I press you for a small write up on it?

Cheers

 

I'm curious as well, since I have the same amount of RAM and about the same usage.

 

I third the above.

 

firefox has option to cache using ram
for IE and chrome don't have these options.

for IE you can change temp internet folder and window temp folder and direct them to ramdisk, would have same effect. for chrome, simply create a ramdisk say drive R: and you will have to J link chrome profile towards it, and have it save on shutdown otherwise you'll lose your profile. if you don't wish to put entire profile into ramdisk you can simply find the cache folders I believe there are 4 big ones.

try googling theres a lot of guide out there, some done through command prompt and with windows gui.

 

I was using an SSD in my MacBook Pro before I got my Toshiba Satellite P75-A7200. Now, the MacBook Pro has a 750GB Seagate Momentous XT (2nd Gen) installed and the Toshiba has a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO as the boot drive and the stock 750GB Toshiba 5400RPM drive for storage. Supposedly, this computer has an mSATA slot somewhere within, so I may end up doing a three-drive configuration at some point.

 

I have both going on.... my MBP is 768GB SSD.... and my AW's are 750GB 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 with SSD Cache... honestly, they're about the same speed as the pure SSD and a lot less money / GB.

 

Best combination i've found is to combine a big SSD with a bigger storage hard drive
I couldn't go back to a standard hard drive as a boot drive, things just load to slowly.

 

I still use 7200RPM HD's because I cannot afford an SSD and they haven't reached the price / storage levels that I want yet.

I will wait until I can buy a 1TB SSD for $250.

 

Funny how times have changed and how cheap computing has become. I remember paying $1500 extra in 1983 dollars for a 10 MB hard disk for my IBM PC-XT.

 

And three years earlier, a $4K system came with (count them...) two 5 1/4" Floppy Disk drives.

 

remember when they came out with "Half Height" drives? you could get two floppy's and a HD in one PC? :thumbsup:

 

You sound similar to what they would have said during the introduction of the internal combustion engine over the horse drawn carriage.

The application of an SSD is much more than just a mere fashion statement: It is a technological break through. If price wasn't an issue, I very much doubt if anyone here would consider an HDD over an SSD.

 

Well, the price is quite an issue! If I used SSD instead of HDD, my notebook's price would skyrocket!
However, I really want to put an SSD inside my notebook since one of my internal HDDs is getting too hot after I put an ExpressCard 2xUSB3.0 card. With such prices, it's a stupid idea.

 

That's the down side to SSD the price and for the same price on HDD you get a larger capacity. That for some isn't a issue but those not pushing the SSD performance it's a hard sell. If the SSD and capacity was to match HDD and capacity you can bet I be buying them myself. But in this day and age HDD or SSD can't be eaten on a empty stomach.

 

Had a hybrid drive once. Little speed difference between SSD and mechanical after Win7 booted up.

Scared of SDD's though b/c average read/write cycles less than 5 yrs for constant users. Can anyone confirm?

With HDD's, you get unlimited read/write if drive never fails...

 

Lots of people talk about 1TB SSD's, but SSD's perform a lot better if you keep a lot of unallocated drive space on them. So you end up paying $500 for at most a 750GB drive unless you let performance suffer.

 

^ I can't for the life of me understand why someone would need 1TB or more of drive space. Yes, if you are a professional video editor.

I once had a 500GB HDD. Filled it up with all sorts of anime and stuff. Almost bought another one. Then, I realized, there are always new shows coming out, and I'll never rewatch all those things. My max. need is now no more than 150GB total drive space, more like 75GB if those pesky system recovery DVD images that I haved stored on the hard drive become obsolete.

Back to thread topic:
------------------------------

I move my laptop around the time while using it. No problem so far with the almost 5 year-old HDD... People tend to forget laptop HDD's were designed to be moved around, unlike their desktop counterparts...

 

Some people need more than 1tb drive for movies. I have 3 1tb drives in my laptop and their mostly full. I only download movies-shows in HD versions. Or some people really do have that many games and who wants to wait a full day to download Rome 2 at 16-20gb(?).

 

^ My dad used to record all kinds of TV shows on VHS. He now has a closet full of VHS cassettes he'll never re-watch (he prefers the hi-res of blu-rays). Makes me wonder, what was the point in him taping all those things? I can understand using up maybe 100GB to store games you're playing now and 3 months ago... But, what is the point in using up the other 900GB to store all those (old) movies and games on HDD?