ID:278516
 
With the HDD technology continuously pushing the capacity of hard drives (I saw a 3TB HDD on Newegg for almost $500 x.x), have they even improved their write/read speeds? And what ARE their write/read speeds specifically anyways? Latency doesn't tell me much, unless you can do some math with it to figure out the actual write/read speeds of the drive. Could someone give me the write/read speeds of 5400RPM, 7200RPM, and 10000RPM HDDs on the market right now?

With SSDs nowadays pushing past 500MB/s read speed (this drive in particular peaked my interest), is there anything better at a similar or cheaper price in the HDD or SSD market?
Average Read Performance on various drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/ Average-Read-Transfer-Performance,658.html


Average Write:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/ Average-WriteTransfer-Performance,659.html


Price:Performance:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/Price-Performance-Index,670.html


These things vary heavily by manufacturer and drive quality, but those are some decent numbers to judge by. The only way to know for sure is to find a benchmark somewhere for the specific drive you're looking at, or buy it and test it yourself.

If you're looking for a drive specifically for gaming/speed, SSD is the winner hands down, and the 64GB you linked to could easily hold 5-6 modern games if that's all you put on it.
In response to Robertbanks2
Well, you'd also want to make it your OS drive as well.
There wouldn't be as much of a performance increase if you put all of your games on the SSD but left your OS on a regular HDD.

Robertbanks2 wrote:
Average Read Performance on various drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/ Average-Read-Transfer-Performance,658.html


Average Write:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/ Average-WriteTransfer-Performance,659.html


Price:Performance:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ 3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/Price-Performance-Index,670.html


These things vary heavily by manufacturer and drive quality, but those are some decent numbers to judge by. The only way to know for sure is to find a benchmark somewhere for the specific drive you're looking at, or buy it and test it yourself.

If you're looking for a drive specifically for gaming/speed, SSD is the winner hands down, and the 64GB you linked to could easily hold 5-6 modern games if that's all you put on it.
In response to Robertbanks2
So Hard Drives' read/write speeds are roughly identical. That makes sense. But the top drives are peaking ~100 MB/s with 10,000 RPMs where SSDs are peaking 500-600MB/s (getting close to the SATA III standard).

There's just the issue of cost per gigabyte when it comes to SSDs. Could you or anyone else recommend a SSD like the one I put in the OP? A 60GB or 64GB and then a 120GB or 128GB capacity SSD is preferable.
In response to Spunky_Girl
64GB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147502


128GB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147161


The performance on the larger SSD drives declines, but is still tons cheaper than a disc drive of even half it's speed, and with a similar capacity.
More space means slower. If you need fast HDD you could get several small and fast ones, then make RAID.
In response to Zaoshi
Even in RAID, the only advantage over SSDs (and not even all SSDs) is the write speed increase on HDDs. The only way to match the 500MB/s read speed of a single SSD, with HDDs, I would have to RAID at least five HDDs.
In response to Robertbanks2
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706

They limited this beast to 1 per customer haha. $300 SSD for $170. 550 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write. 120GB. Amazing.
In response to Spunky_Girl
There's no need to have such high speed anyways, as it'll be able to read only big defragmented files at max speed.
In response to Zaoshi
Well when you own games whose map size are 20GB big (Vanguard), it helps to have a half-gig of read speed :)
In response to Spunky_Girl
True. But it's still only useful if you read a lot of data at once. If game world is huge it's likely to have a lot of small objects, therefore you won't have full speed. In such cases you need low seek time (~high RPM)
In response to Zaoshi
This is kind of the beauty of solid-state, as it's near enough random access in nature, so latencies and seek times are much reduced on your more conventional 7200 RPM drives, comparable to 10K RPM drives (raptors and company).

Your call at that point is mostly cost, as yeah, an appropriate RAID array of good 7200 or 10K disks will out-perform solid-state for database style (small object) commits and reads.
In response to Stephen001
How would a HDD's latency out-perform a 0.1ms SSD latency?
In response to Spunky_Girl
It's not 0.1 ms when all said and done I'm afraid. It is however from storage to buffer. The RAID trick is mostly dealing with improved SATA and controller latency for independent reads. The kind of thing you get in document-oriented DBs like CouchDB for instance. Hence we deploy a nice 6 disk RAID 0+1 cluster on 15K RPMs for our own CouchDB servers at work. Much improved latency and through-put in those scenarios. I assume if our data-centre provider permitted, a nice RAIDed solid-state solution would be preferable.
In response to Stephen001
It's not 0.1ms to find and access the address in its memory? After that, it's read/write times that matter.
In response to Spunky_Girl
Quoted seek times are time to disk cache, is my understanding. So it's 0.1 ms to get it to the disk buffer assuming it wasn't already there, in the case of your chosen SSD.
In response to Stephen001
So what is the "true" latency on SSDs? The time it takes to find/access the address in its memory with the stored information it is seeking, that is.
In response to Spunky_Girl
Pretty much, yup.
In response to Stephen001
That does not answer my question. I was asking what their latency is; not what latency means.
In response to Spunky_Girl
Bump?
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