SSD actual performance increase over HDD

I am sorry it took about a week and a half for me to be able to test my SSD against my Scorpio Black in actual day to day work, but it required duplication of work, something I really don't have extra time to do. My day to day work and my 5 kids prevent much extra time. but after several attempts, I was able to focus on WHY I was doing it, and not go into work focus mode. I have to upload, rename, and send via ftp pictures for our website several days a week. In order to do this as a controlled test, it meant I had to duplicate the process as close to exact as a human can. After several attempts where I tried to do each process in order on one drive, then the other, I realized that too many factors came into play (i.e. distractions, like calls, questions, typos, the onset of Alzheimers...you get the picture). So I had to break it down into sections. First section on the HDD,timed, then logoff, logon to the SSD and duplicate it, also timed. After going through each part and timing it on each drive, here are the results.

Upload to HDD, 30 pictures: 1:37.2 minutes.
Upload to SSD, 30 pictures: 1:00.8

Edit on HDD, 11:21.8 minutes
Edit on SSD, 11:30.6

Send via FTP, on HDD, 2:17.6 minutes
Send via FTP, on SSD, 2:06.5

The only area where human error came into play was the edit. Typos were common for each drive, just not necessarily the same, and not requiring the same amount of time to re-edit.

At the end, I came up with a time of 15:16.6 minutes for the HDD
and a time of... 14:37.9 minutes for the SSD

I see the difference as 38.7 seconds over roughly a 15 minute time span. Not huge, but I do this 4 times a week on this type of work, over 52 weeks, and come up with.... 134 minutes a year saved on this work alone, over 52 hours spent working. Or about 2% of my time saved. If in fact this is correct, then if I spent about 20 hours a week on my computer, then I save about 20.8 hours a year. This does not factor any other hours spent on this drive. So factor in whatever your hourly rate is, and decide how long it takes to pay for the drive (or not).

FYI, I tried this several times without keeping everything controlled, and what a pain to remember why and what I am doing, rather than trying to do it right as fast as I can. Disclaimer: this is far from a scientific test. Just one guy trying to give a real life test. For a casual user, you probably won't see any real noticable time saving. Doesn't mean your not getting one, but it is not like your going to save an hour on a two hour project. But it is faster, at least for me, and it matters, at least to me. I will try it again in the next week or so if I can make the time. Hope this helps everyone.

 

You are correct - the price of an SSD almost never makes sense from a pure productivity perspective.

An SSD is specifically targeted at people who want the convenience of fast performance, and are willing to sacrifice price and storage capacity to get that convenience. An SSD is luxury item.

The value of an SSD is not application load times or OS boot times. I believe the real value of an SSD is its high IOPS (I/O's per second). It is basically a measure of how many read/write operations a drive can handle simultaneously, and is a measurement of how well the drive multitasks. A mechanical hard drive has an IOPS rating somewhere in the ~500-600 range, while an SSD can top 35,000 - 40,000 IOPS. To me, the ability to multitask to an almost infinite degree without ever feeling performance lag is the value of the SSD - more than transfer rates, boot times, or app load times.

Here is a video I made showing an extreme example of this: Windows 7 boot + loading 27 apps at boot time on an SSD, in about 1 minute.
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

A real-world example of when you'd actually want this:
You are installing a game/app in the background, and launch a web browser. Even simple tasks like web browsing will be noticeably slower and feel laggier, because the install process already maxes out the IOPS of a mechanical drive.

 

It may not be scientific, but it's still worthwhile and just as relevant as a lot of benchmarks. Thanks.

 

You're right, it's far from scientific. But is is generally descriptive of what most people get out of there SSDs. Still, there's more to an SSD than just speed: Its dramatically more durable and does produce less heat.

Nevertheless, the price difference is still astronomical. So unless you have a specific need, or just that extra cash, I'd put them on the back burner
until the price becomes a bit more economical.

p.s. Phil is a proponent and early adapter of the SSDs hybrid. However, while anyone with a single bay can benefit from that all-in-one hybrid design. Those notebooks with dual bays, can get the same benefit (or better?) benefit using that idea with each bay being specialized to it's own task. For now, an SSD in that configuration can't be beat.

 

Shouldn't gains from booting and launching programs be included in your time savings calculations?

 

You'll see the most difference in situations where a hdd has to seek alot and receives lots of consecutive random requests.

In home use, you'll probably see the most benefit in all types of system scan (virus scans, anti-malware scans, registry scans etc) all types of searches, hitting up paging file, the creation, retrieval and removal of temporary files and folders by the OS etc. More so when doing many of these tasks all at the same time. I think people are also forgetting that bulk file copy and the like are things that hdds are very good at. You can RAID a few Scorpio Blacks and you can get *huge* sequential transfer rates and huge capacity for less money.

But aside from speed there are other considerations - SSDs are completely silent, extremely reliable in the short term because there are no mechanical/moving parts that can fail. Power consumption is lower which means better battery life - very critical if your productivity necessitates using your notebook far away from a wall socket. SSDs can be miniaturized much more easily than HDDs and can be built into ever smaller, lighter computers which is how you can squeeze 4x storage disks in RAID-0 into a Sony Z series which is only an inch thick, has an area the size of an a4 sheet of paper and weighs less than 1.5 kilos. In such a situation being productive does not necessarily require that you be in the same workplace.

If you are buying into SSDs right now though you are still an early adopter. There are a couple more huge leaps to be made in terms of affordability, capacity and the eventual transition from NAND to some type of memristor which will essentially eliminate the difference between the permanent storage disk and RAM.

 

Hayte, a couple of points:

SSD's are not completely silent (some do hear them).

Power consumption is also greatly variable - depends on the SSD, the system it is in and the usage pattern on how much power is saved (or not).

 

Sorry, I should have been more clear. When I timed each operation, such as uploading the photos, it was from the time I started to place the xd card into the slot until I actually was completely finished uploading. Same with the ftp, it was from when I started to click on the ftp program until I exited it.

For me, over the course of the year the ssd will pay for itself (maybe at least double, based on estimated time saved over the course of a year, including other things such as research and one time projects at night or on weekends when I feel the need). So it is for each to decide why they might need one. Now I used this on a test of 30 photos, however I usually have to work on between 100 and 150 photos a shot, 4 times a week. I will try to do this with other work, like spreadsheets and reports I generate, and see if there are time savings there too.

The reason the time savings are important to me, and justify the ssd is that I only wish to have a 40 hour work week. I have anywhere from a 9 hour day to as much as 11 or 12 hours at times, so any time savings I get is that much sooner I am done with work for the day.

 

The first and third operations are the closest to absolute comparison. The second one is not only the longest, but most impacted by my lack of speed typing, and most prone to fluctuation due to my numerous typos, which I was unable to either eliminate or duplicate per photo. Mostly because there is no rhyme or reason to my mistakes. Using the 1st and 3rd as guides, and multiply that by about 4 (the number of pix I work with at one time is usually about 4 times the number I used in my comparison).

 

I get that. But what I don't get: every day you also save some time with booting and launching. Why not include them with your time savings?

 

Nice work capturing some real world info/application. Concur time is money (or time you can spend doing other things). To me the SSDs pay for themselves quickly. Also concur with Phil, factor in the boot and loads times of the apps you use. That's one of the immediate factors of the SSD - Responsiveness. That too will save you time over the course of a day.
Again thanks for capturing this info.

 

Time saved IS valuable, but really, this is (at least personally) more about luxury than anything. I start up my computer once a day, shut it down once a day. I don't do anything demanding on my computer, but I'm still enjoying the SSD.

As for some cases where SSD is very noticeable: after a fresh install, I always disable drive content indexing to speed things up. I right click C:/, go to properties, deselect the option, and click apply. On my 5400RPM HDD, this takes about 5 minutes. On my Vertex, it takes about 15-30 seconds. Changing the properties of every file on the disk qualifies as an activity with a high number of IOs per second, and also small size writes. The SSD does indeed excel.

 

Except in a world where money IS an object. Otherwise...you're right.

 

I redid this test, but as opposed to last time when I ran each part of the test on one drive, then the other, then back to the first drive for the next part of the test, this time I ran the complete test on one drive, from start up to finish, then cold started on the other one as well. The results were much different, as I believe Phil was alluding to when he asked for start and load times. Here is this weeks results, using a set of 45 pictures, starting up cold, downloading the pix, editing them, then sending them via ftp and closing out the program and shutting down.
HDD: 17min 40.0 seconds 1:30.5 to startup and download, 16.09.5 to edit and send
SSD: 12min 28.9 seconds 1:05.1 to startup and download, 11:23.8 to edit and send

The much quicker startup will acount for some of the time savings, and since I use this laptop at several offices and home each day, that starts to add up the time savings. But the biggest savings was in edit and send, around 4 and a half minutes. The total time saved is a bit over 5 minutes, so the SSD did the start to finish at about 2/3 the time of the HDD. In the future, I will try some other types of timed tests to see what, if any, time savings I am getting.

 

Well, you have no mechanical components to make noise and vibration. SSD's have that electronic "squeal" that some can hear, other's can't. For me SSD's are a godsend due to vibration. My hand falls asleep usually due to a hard drive vibration. Not the case in my Sager, but netbook definitely.

 

I can hear it if I put my ear to it, but otherwise nothing.