Comparison of HDD and SSD drives in terms of usability. Part 1

Introduction

Let's move away from the reviews of the laptops themselves for a while and turn to their components, namely storage devices. Until the last moment, hard disk drives, aka "hard drives", reigned supreme here. However, relatively recently they have a strong competitor - flash memory drives, SSD (Eng. Solid State Drive).

An SSD is a fundamentally different type of drive, it is built on the same technologies that are used in flash memory, and is similar to flash drives in terms of organization of both cells and the drive as a whole.

Detailed information about the speed and functional characteristics, as well as the results of testing modern drives can be found in the following website materials:

• An overview of one of the first SSD drives, .
• , in which the Corsair SSD is involved. This SSD also participated in our tests.
• Latest at the time of testing fast SSDs and investigating the impact of SSD capacity on performance.
• Other SSD and storage performance content hard drives can be read on the site.

At the same time, most of the tests are designed for savvy readers and are a comparison of the performance characteristics of selected drives. And although they contain a lot of interesting information about specific products, a large number of storage properties (especially those that are difficult to unambiguously measure) remains behind the scenes. Therefore, a potential buyer cannot always determine whether he needs a particular device.

In this series of materials, we will try to move away from the traditional drive testing methodology (you can see its description on our website) and focus on subjective impressions of use. First of all, this study should answer the question: what does the average user get from switching to SSD, what are the advantages of a new type of storage in everyday work, is it worth switching to them or is it better to stay with traditional hard drives for now? And in what cases are certain drives more profitable.

Basic Storage Requirements

Any user has two basic requirements for a storage device: reliability(so that you can not be afraid for the safety of your data) and speed. Of course, there are other requirements, but they play a secondary role and are unlikely to be taken into account if reliability or speed is unsatisfactory.

Reliability is a key requirement, the importance of which cannot be overstated. Losing a laptop is not so scary: you can buy the same one in the store. But if you lost your main laptop with all your personal archive or it refused HDD, then everything is much sadder: you lose unique information, which is often simply impossible to recover. It is obvious (and has long been emphasized in all presentations) that the information in a corporate laptop can cost many times more than the entire laptop with giblets. However, the safety of information is important not only when it comes to business secrets: there is also the concept of subjective value. It is difficult to evaluate your photographs or documents in terms of money, but for the author they mean a lot. Of course have backup, Internet storage, etc., but their use is not always possible and convenient.

At the same time, the reliability of data storage systems for laptops is a very complex and painful issue. Due to the design features hard disks afraid of vibration and shock. During operation, the head hovers very close to the surface of the magnetic disk. Shock or jolt may cause it to touch the surface and either damage itself or scratch the surface - data at that point will be lost.

And with laptops, this happens all the time. They caught on the wire - and it flew off the table or sofa, they worked "on their knees" and dropped it, even a simple shake can damage the device. Very often careless or unskilled users themselves shorten the life of their drives. To take at least a typical example, when a user, holding a laptop on his lap, presses the "hibernation" button, the screen goes blank (for some reason, in new Windows systems this happens, although XP showed on the screen that the hibernation process is still in progress) and the user is in full certain that the system has turned off, throws the laptop on the sofa - and at this time the system intensively writes the state of the operating system to disk.

Most manufacturers in corporate models (where the safety of information is the most important factor) began to introduce active protection hard drive, which should park the heads (take them away from the surface) if the laptop is jerked or hit. Manufacturers in the development of new models of mobile hard drives trying to make them more resistant to external influences. However, this stock is not always enough.

The second most important requirement is speed drive operation. And here it should be noted that modern hard drives (especially mobile ones) are already close to the ceiling of their capabilities. We can't expect a radical increase in the speed of work, we can only hope for some evolutionary growth, and even then... Moreover, due to the design features, a hard drive cannot always work at maximum speed. Firstly, the speed of reading and writing data strongly depends on whether it is the beginning or the end of the disk, and secondly, although during linear reading or writing (when a large amount of information is read and written in a row), the disk can provide good speed, however, when working " randomly, the speed drops to indecently small values, 1-2 MB / s. And most often the main hard drive of a laptop works in this mode. Therefore, for example, laptops take a long time to load: you need to read many small operating system files from different places.

SSD is a fundamentally different type of device, so most of the disadvantages of HDD are unusual for it. Briefly recall the main consumer pros of SSD:

• High read and write speeds that are the same anywhere on the drive.
• Many times lower latency when working with data compared to hard drives.
• No Moving Parts: An SSD is shock, vibration, and shock resistant, less likely to lose data.
• SSD does not heat up, does not make noise, does not vibrate itself.
• Less power consumption.
• Large operating temperature range.
• Better weight and size compared to a hard drive (the drive can be made smaller and lighter).

The main disadvantages of SSD:

• Very high price.
• Limited capacity.
• Dependence of the price on the capacity of the drive, the high cost of additional capacity.
• Perhaps the limited life of the memory cells.

Let's try to evaluate how much these pros and cons of SSDs are significant in themselves and in comparison with modern hard drives during constant operation.

Test sections

The main objective of our testing is to understand the difference in operation between an SSD and a regular hard drive. First of all, this concerns speed characteristics: it is interesting to see how noticeable the difference in speed between a hard drive and an SSD drive is in the normal work of a laptop user. However, our testing is not limited to this.

All testing is divided into four large parts. In the first part, we talk about the test participants, methodology, etc.

In the second part, we will look at the performance of test participants in synthetic applications, and also evaluate, using the example of one of the participants, how much the load of the operating system with data and third-party programs affects the work.

In the third part, we will compare the performance of test participants in real work. These are the main operations related to the operation of the operating system (loading, shutting down, entering and exiting hibernation), as well as the speed of copying files. And also on clean system, and on a system with applications installed. In addition, we will look at such important parameter like file copy speed.

Finally, in the fourth part, we summarize the subjective sensations of using SSD and HDD during normal work on a laptop. Plus, we compare parameters such as heat and noise, as well as battery life.

However, even this is not the end of our testing. For at my disposal were both drives, operating system with a set of applications (this is my work system, so it is constantly in operation and gradually degrades), as well as cloning software. So it is possible to return to the tests at any time and at the same time see if the performance of the system worsens after a long run (there are persistent rumors about this). Therefore, we invite readers to actively participate in the discussion, ask questions, offer their own tests and point out the moments where this or that type of drive differs for better or, conversely, for worse.

Test participants and methodology

It should be noted that fate has made some adjustments to the testing program. Initially, we planned to compare six drives: four hard drives and two SSD drives. However, in the middle of testing, our test bench broke down, so only three drives took part in the testing core, but the most interesting ones. If our readers are of great interest, you can try to test other drives using a similar method.

So, in testing involved:

Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500 GB;
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160 GB;
CORSAIR CMFSSD-128GBG2D 128 GB SSD.

Let's look at the characteristics of the test participants in more detail.

Let's stop there for now: we have a capacious disk, we have fast disk and there is an SSD drive with good performance: not the top, but close to it.

Test Methodology

All tests were carried out on an ASUS K52Jr laptop. The laptop is relatively modern and fast, built on the new Intel HM55 Express chipset.

For testing, we took a standard configured Windows 7 system that comes with ASUS K52Jr with installed drivers. Only programs (such as Norton, etc.) were removed from the system. I want to draw attention to this. Theoretically, in updated versions drivers, the performance of the SSD could have improved. However, we decided to take the drivers from the package (especially since the model is relatively fresh). So you can "fix" the state of the system so that all drives work in more or less the same conditions. In addition, not all users (especially those who work on a laptop, but do not experiment) like games with drivers.

Synthetic tests

We put on a clean system HDD programs Tune 4.01 and Ashampoo HDD Control, with which we evaluated the performance of drives in synthetic tests. It should be noted that the tests were done in order to understand what can be expected from the drive. They were not decisive.

For HDD Tune, we did the main test of reading from the surface of the disk. I would like to draw the readers' attention to the fact that these results cannot be completely objective, because the test was performed on the system disk on which the operating system is installed. The system and applications may well also work with the disk directly during the test, as a result of which the results may differ on different runs and will not be completely objective and repeatable. For the same reason, there is no write test. Full-scale tests can be viewed in other materials on our website, where they were carried out in accordance with an objective and comprehensive methodology.

In addition, we decided to remove additional tests in HD Tune: additional search and reading tests, random reading tests in file system. Finally, we measured how long it takes the program to scan the disk and display its structure (number of folders and their size).

HDD Control was used more as a program to check the results.

We also paid attention to the temperature data of the drives obtained during the test. Except, of course, the SSD, which does not heat up.

Real operating system tests

We decided to see how big the difference is in using different types of drives during normal work with a laptop. To do this, several groups of tests were carried out.

Operation of the operating system

First, we measured the speed of the operating system performing the main actions: booting, hibernating, waking up and shutting down(in that order).

Windows 7 feels much better optimized than its predecessor, Vista. In particular, in everyday work you constantly feel that it “turns the disk” much less during work and in its absence. What Vista does in this case is a separate question, because. the laptop can, standing in absolute idle, thresh with a disk for half an hour, which has a great effect on performance, application responsiveness, and battery life. Plus, I thought new system less “slows down” during active work with the hard disk, i.e. while the system is actively working with a hard disk, you can continue to work, open application responds. Although sometimes there are situations that cause some irritation.

We tried to measure the time when the system completely "booted", i.e. stopped loading data from the hard drive. Windows 7 completely turns on the desktop at startup and shows with all its appearance that it is ready to perform tasks, but the hard drive continues to work with might and main, loading something up. When measuring, we tried to take this time into account. Although at the start the situation is more or less decent, after the system is completely “ready” (an hourglass disappears next to the cursor), the disk spins for another half a minute, but when you exit hibernation, this process lasts two or three minutes. You can work (I specifically checked), but, for example, new applications are difficult to launch.

Speaking about the start of the system, it is worth noting one important point. When booting, the hard drive is constantly active, and it seems that the download speed depends only on it. However, in a system with an SSD, the disk access indicator goes out from time to time, i.e. data loading is not 100% of the operating system loading time.

Data copy speed

Copying and transferring data - important characteristic, and in many ways (if not all) it depends on the drive.

For this part of testing, we prepared four groups of files.

First, a 700 MB movie (folder size 734,486,528 bytes). Secondly, a set of zip files is a set of drivers for ASUS laptops. Folder size 811 742 316 bytes, inside 53 files, ranging in size from 2 MB to 102 MB. Thirdly, and this is the most interesting - a set of documents. The folder size is 943,813,860 bytes. This includes MS Word documents and saved web pages (each of which comes with a folder with graphic files used on the page). All files are very small, from 2 KB to 40 KB. As a rule, it is these files that are the most difficult to copy, because. they are scattered on the disk and copying takes a long time.

The fourth set is a 4,532,507 KB folder. Inside are 24 rar files. We took a 4.5 GB archive and zipped it into a 200 MB multi-volume archive. In addition to the copy tests, we used it in the unzip test.

For tests, the disk was divided into two partitions, approximately equal in capacity. Next, we copied files from drive C to drive D and back. Those. files were copied within the same drive, and it worked simultaneously for reading and writing.

We also measured the time during which Total Commander erases files (a set of documents) from disk C and D. It should be noted that large files are erased very quickly (which is understandable) and there is nothing to measure there, only erasing a folder with documents is of interest. I would also like to point out that the standard Conductor, which erases only information about the location of the file, almost instantly reports the deletion of anything.

In addition, we have created in RAM virtual disk 1 GB and tried copying files to and from it. In this test, the drive is read-only or write-only, so theoretically it should perform better.

Finally, we tried to see how much the unzipping process depends on the hard drive. To do this, we unzipped big file from a multi-volume archive on disk C.

Tests on a working system

After completing the tests on a clean system, we installed a large amount of software that is commonly used at work on the disk. This includes antivirus, office applications, applications for working with mobile phone, organizer and more. The applications are fairly standard, plus I tried to pick up a few applications that have an "agent" that starts with the system and works with it all the time.

After installing the applications, we again measured the time required for the main actions of the operating system. We also measured the copy time again.

After that, we tried installing two games (Crysis Warhead and H.A.W.K.) on the disc. We also indexed the music collection using Helium Music Management and opened the photo collection using XnView.

Finally, we measured the startup time of some applications, such as MS Word.

And in the final we measured the time of the “parallel start”. To do this, we turned on the antivirus check, started the process of copying files from D to C and launched MS Word to see how much more difficult it would be for it to start in this mode.

I note that the OS tests (start, shutdown, etc.) were measured with a stopwatch, so a small error is possible there. Time was measured from the moment the laptop was started, i.e. including time spent checking and BIOS start. Here I want to note that the presence of the disk in optical drive greatly increased the time BIOS boot(20 seconds instead of the usual 4), tests were carried out without optical disc in the drive.

Testing in the OS was carried out through recording actions from the screen, then we looked at how long the action took on the timeline of the recording program and rounded up to whole seconds. Anticipating objections that this program could also work with the disk, I will answer: yes, it could. Just like any other resident program. Since it is about working system, rather than synthetic testing, then additional effects that are more or less stable help to more clearly illustrate the work in real conditions.

Well, let's move on to the tests themselves!

Synthetic Performance

Synthetic tests were needed primarily in order to place applicants, to see what to expect from them in greenhouse conditions. In addition, if there was something wrong with one of the drives, it would have been revealed already at this stage.

To begin with, let's look at the simplest test - reading from the surface. First things first, we decided to take a quick look at how repeatability is, i.e. whether the test will produce close numbers on multiple runs. The system rebooted between restarts, but not all of the resulting diagrams are presented in the article. So...

And now let's try to remove the data after some time, when the disk has worked thoroughly under load.

As you can see, the two tests give very similar results. However (just an example of why you can't test on the system drive)...

At some launches, such failures appeared. Either these are accesses to the system disk, or disk problems due to overheating (look at the temperature, it is very high). Finally, we took the results the next day (but also at the end of testing):

Thus, the results are quite stable (only the reading from the buffer jumps strongly). Although in general this drive did not show good speed even for laptop drives. Also worth noting is the very high temperature, which can even lead to bad consequences for the disk.

Let's look at the graphs of the second program:

As you can see, the second "run" is worse, the search time was especially affected. Because of the heat? Let's see what the next day:

The graph is relatively flat, there was a failure, apparently, the system was accessing the disk at the time of the test.

Thus, in general, the repeatability of HDTune 4.01 is good, while that of HDD Control is worse. In the future, we ran the test three times and chose the picture without failure. Except for 5400.6, where the second run failed.

What do we see? 5400.6 gives much higher linear performance numbers compared to 7200.2. With worse access (on average, in tests it turned out 18.5 ms), which is generally understandable. Hence the conclusion: in linear operations 5400.6 is noticeably faster, in random read and write operations (just small files) it can be slower ... Or maybe not. Let's see below how this is done in real life. In the meantime, we will double-check the results in another program.

"Parallel count" confirms the received data. Those. we will assume that 5400.6 is faster in terms of linear speed. Moreover, it is also much more capacious, i.e. the probability that the entire system partition will be in the fastest part of the disk is higher. Although I should note that the 7200 has a smaller spread during random reading.

And finally, let's look at the star of today's testing: SSD Corsair.

As they say, "begin". Let me remind you that in the characteristics of this utility it was stated that the active mode is UDMA-5, the results of which we are observing. From this, at least we can conclude that it is not always enough to buy an SSD and insert it in place of the hard drive.

Let's check with the second program:

As you can see, here the speed is shown much higher - and closer to the declared figures.

It remains only to repeat the conclusions from almost any article. In benchmarks that show maximum performance, in greenhouse conditions, SSD goes very far ahead of traditional hard drives in terms of performance. At the same time, again, unlike hard drives, it can maintain the same high speed anywhere on the disk without "falling through" towards the end. The third conclusion: SSD has a very short access time, i.e. the drive instantly responds to commands from the operating system. This parameter is almost an order of magnitude better than that of hard drives.

However, these conclusions have long been known. Let's see how things stand with more detailed tests.

Extended tests of random search and linear reading

Let's start with 5400.6.

We have already seen the second four indicators, this is a linear read at the beginning, middle and end of the disk plus reading from the buffer. It is much more interesting to look at the beginning of the plate. The first two numbers characterize a random search, and the picture is bleak. It is in this mode, when the disk constantly has to move the head and look for a small piece of information, and then move the head again, that performance suffers the most. This can be seen from the huge drop: the read speed is less than a megabyte / sec. And the next two numbers show the difference between working with small and large blocks.

Let's compare the results with 7200.2.

As you can see, purely when searching, the positioning of the heads is a little faster, which gives a tiny advantage. As soon as a large block appeared in the work (that is, it took at least a little bit to count in a row), the 5400 instantly took the lead, and its advantage is quite significant. With sequential reading, everything is clear and so.

Now let's compare hard drives with SSDs.

In absolute terms, SSDs are way ahead. The access time is always the same (with one exception, but hard drives This test was also not easy. With random reading, the speed also drops very much, although it remains very high compared to hard drives. We have already discussed linear reading, there are no surprises here and, in general, cannot be.

As you can see, SSDs are way ahead in terms of speed. However, there is a drop in performance when working with small blocks and volumes of information, and it is also very large. The SSD remains in the lead, but the absolute numbers are somewhat disappointing. By the way, note that with linear reading, the results of exactly the access time are not so different. There is nothing surprising here, but I will pay attention to it anyway.

Random access operations

Since we started about the access time, let's take a closer look at the corresponding test. Let's start, as usual, with 5400.6.

The test was taken when the hard drive was already warm enough (37 degrees Celsius, i.e. +5° relative to the idle temperature). I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in this mode the number of sectors increases, access to which takes a long time, and this happens with both disks.

The graph looks different because here is a different division price, and on both scales. If you look at the numbers, then with small blocks 7200.2 is faster (just 14.5 milliseconds versus 18.5), but with a block size of 1 MB it already loses. What about SSD?

With such operations, hard drives to SSD are like the moon. What about the speed of reading, what about the access time. The difference is simply vast. Since the SSD reads information in blocks, the larger the block, the larger the gap grows. In terms of numbers, this drive is far ahead, but it does not like small blocks just like ordinary hard drives. Those. it will work faster relative to the disk, but relative to its own maximum results, it shows an equally sad picture.

Working with the file system

Let's look at the work in the file system, i.e. benchmark, a little closer to real life.

For comparison, let's see what result 7200.2 gives

It can be seen that 5400.6 is faster everywhere. Let's see how the SSD performs in this test.

In SSD, the graph is smoother and characteristic features become visible: dislike for small blocks and a stable lag between the write speed and the read speed. The overall speed is very high, much higher than the disks. I must also say that the test results for SSDs are smoother, there is not such a run-to-run variation as HDDs.

Preliminary conclusions

The obvious conclusion: the speed of the SSD is much higher, as well as the access time is much better. However, these are not new conclusions at all; they have been repeated in one form or another for quite a long time. Of course, the SSD has its own characteristics, which, by the way, can be read about in objective testing, the link to which we provided.

The mutual results of hard drives surprised me: I did not expect such a lag in 7200.2. Although it is clear that the model is older and the recording density is lower (this has a bad effect on the speed of working with a disk), nevertheless it seemed to me that it should overtake 5400.6. In practice, 7200.2 is almost everywhere inferior in terms of speed in absolute numbers. In addition, and this is a very important operational fact: it heats up much more strongly, i.e. it's not that fun to use. 5400.6 retains moderate heat. SSD, by the way, does not heat up at all, but because. there are no temperature sensors (and he doesn’t need them), then this is subjective and we will leave it for the part with subjective measurements. Thus, when choosing a disk for a laptop, you need to be guided by the freshness of the model, but the rotation speed is not a very important indicator.

This is where we will stop. And in the next part, we are waiting for tests from real life - the time of starting and shutting down the system, copying files, launching applications, and much more.

Good day!

Most often, testing the read / write speed on an SSD is required after purchasing a new drive (sometimes to diagnose slow computer performance, individual programs). Of course, there is no built-in tool in Windows to do this work 😉...

Actually, in this article I will give several utilities with which you can quickly enough (within 3-5 minutes!) evaluate the speed of the SSD.

By the way, many drive sellers also provide test results from these programs. (therefore, the information is also relevant for those users who are looking for a new drive and want to see the difference by comparing the performance with their current drive).

Addition!

How to check the status of an SSD drive (utilities for diagnosing the "health" of an SSD) -

Important!

To start testing: turn off all programs that load the disk (games, editors, torrents, etc.). Also pay attention to how much free space is on your drive (it is recommended that this number be at least 20-25% (affects test results)).

How to check the read / write speed of an SSD drive

Option 1: CrystalDiskMark

Very simple and free program to test the speed of disks (HDD, SSD, and other drives). To start the test you need:

1. download and extract the utility from the archive (you may need it);
2. after starting the program, specify the number of read / write cycles (default value is 5), file size for test (default 1 GB), and select a drive letter. In most cases, you can immediately specify the drive letter, and do nothing else;
3. press the "All" button and wait for the operation to complete (see screenshot below).

Let me break down some points:

1. Seq - sequential read/write speed (i.e. if you, for example, copy a large file to this disk, then the copy speed will be approximately 470 MB / s, see the screen above). Many manufacturers mainly indicate this parameter on the packaging (and advertising);
2. 4KiB - random read/write of 4 KB blocks (the program implements several such tests with different depth and flow). I recommend paying attention, first of all, to the 4KiB Q1T1 line.

Remarque!

In general, many users (mostly) look at sequential read/write speed (Seq). However, according to statistics, more than half of the operations (>70%) with disk accounts for small files.

And the performance of many programs (for example, Windows) is much more dependent on the speed of reading / writing SSD random blocks of 4 KB (which, usually, no one reports in advertising. You can find out about real tests on specialized sites, for example, one of these plates, which is relevant today, is given below).

Option 2: AS SSD Benchmark

A free utility for testing the speed of SSD drives. The program also allows you to get detailed information about the drive itself. (manufacturer, model, etc.), current drivers, used/free space.

In terms of the presentation of the results, it is not much different from the previous utility: a small plate is also displayed with the speed of reading / writing to disk under various conditions (unless scores still appear here, and the test results can be sent to a screenshot or XML file).

Option 3: SSD-Z

A relatively little-known utility that offers a fairly rich functionality. With it you will be able to:

1. test the speed of the SSD drive (see the "Benchmark" section);
2. find out SMART indicators (self-diagnosis of the drive);
3. see the temperature
4. find out the operating time, capacity, supported interfaces;
5. determine the serial number, model, manufacturer;
6. learn about supported technologies (the same TRIM), etc.

By the way, I can’t help but note that although this utility specializes in SSD, it also works with most HDD drives, offering similar functionality.

I will add that SSD-Z does not need to be installed (that is, the program can be written to any of the flash drives and always have it at hand).

Option 4: HD Tune

A multifunctional program for working with hard drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), USB flash drives, etc. With HD Tune you can:

1. conduct a speed and performance test (see sections "Tests" and "File tests");
2. view SMART readings;
3. scan the disk for errors;
4. find out the current temperature of the drive;
5. get information about serial number disk, its size, clipboard, firmware, etc.;
6. adjust the noise level (relevant for);
7. delete files from the disk so that no one can recover them.

As for the speed test: the program shows not only a specific indicator (value), but also builds a graph (ideally, it should resemble a straight line without big waves). An example is in the screenshot above.

Where to see real disk tests

This data can be useful to you when buying a new SSD (to choose the fastest drive based on its capabilities). After all, it is always better to trust the numbers that are obtained in practice than the promises of manufacturers on the packaging 😉...

By the way, if you are choosing a disk for a laptop, then you can learn some basics and points that you should pay attention to from one of my last articles (link below).

How to choose a drive for a laptop, which is better: SSD drive or HDD (hard drive) -

A very convenient site for comparing the performance of CPUs, video cards, hard drives, SSDs, etc. The site contains real tests of SSD drives (almost 1000 pcs.). The results are presented in a table that can be sorted by any of the columns. (capacity, write/read speed, price, user rating, etc.).

Thus, it is quite easy to select exactly what you need.

By the way, here on the site you can download the special. utility and check the performance of its main components: CPU, memory, video card, etc.

Table with SSD drives on https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ (Clickable)

A similar site (however, there are much more tables here). In addition to SSD, statistics are collected on processors, video cards, RAM, HDD, and other components.

That's all for now...

Successful work!

When a PC gamer wonders what are the most important tuning options, in addition to the mandatory purchase of a powerful graphics card and processor, we give him the following advice: replace your classic hard drive with an SSD drive. Just buy not a SATA-SSD, but a flash drive that transfers data via PCI-Express and uses the NVMe protocol for this.

Such models achieve five times higher data transfer rates, and this technology practically does not know the upper limit. Currently, the market is more and more filled with such turbo drives (albeit still quite expensive), so the gamer is faced with the question of whether he is ready to invest a little more money in a significant increase in speed or give preference to the classic, relatively slow SSD.

A New Era of Turbo SSDs

To replace the HDD, you could not think about anything special - just buy a drive of the volume you need. Over time, things got a little more complicated, because SATA interface was originally designed to work with the AHCI protocol (Advanced Host Controller Protocol) and the corresponding driver for slow classical drives with spinning magnetic disks.
An unfortunate side effect: the SATA-600 interface allows a maximum data transfer rate of 600 MB/s.

If you look at ours, you can see that many models reach an average data transfer rate (when reading) already above 550 MB / s, and when writing on their "speedometer" you can often see 540 MB / s. Thus, it becomes obvious that the potential for growth in indicators this technology no longer has today.

In other words, the SATA interface can become the so-called "bottleneck" for flash drives, which are getting faster and faster. It's good that new SSDs get around this restriction speed, if you use PCIe connectors instead of red SATA cables - that is, use the type of connection that was traditionally used for graphics cards. A single PCIe 3.0 lane can theoretically transfer up to 1 GB/s.

Tiny NVMe-SSDs like the new Samsung PM971 are also suitable for ultrabooks or tablets - they are only two centimeters

In this test, four such lines were used to connect SSD drives. Thus, this gives a maximum of 4 GB / s - at least in theory. In practice, this indicator is not achieved: the highest data transfer rate today was demonstrated by newest samsung 960 Pro with a read result of 2702 MB/s.

It's significantly faster than any of the SATA-SSDs, and the interface still hasn't reached its full potential: data transfer rates are currently limited by the type of flash memory used and by media controllers.

It might be interesting:

Two different types of connectors

Unlike SATA drives, when buying a turbo SSD, you should pay attention to the correct choice of its form factor. Fast data storage can be produced both in the form of expansion cards inserted into the PCIe slot, and in the form of memory strips that are installed in the so-called M.2 slots.

Thus, before purchasing the model you like, we recommend that you take a look at the motherboard and check if the interface of the appropriate type is presented there.

Many SSD manufacturers are developing software, which analyzes the state of the NVMe-SSD. Intel calls it Solid-State Drive Toolbox

This tip is especially true for older motherboards, since their M.2 slot can only output the SATA bus for data transfer. The one who collects for himself new computer, may not particularly bother with this issue: motherboards for new processors have M.2 connectors with a PCIe connection and support the new Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) data exchange protocol - this provokes a second turbo jump.

Unlike models for M.2, SSDs in the form of a PCIe card can also be interesting for upgrading older systems. However, care must be taken to ensure that motherboard there was one more free PCIe slot in addition to the one occupied by the graphics card.

And one more small detail can be very important: of the six SSDs taken for this test, four have an expansion card form factor, but only three of them support the PCIe 3.0 standard. Kingston HyperX Predator is limited to only PCIe 2.0, which is only capable of passing 500 MB / s through the line.

While your read and write speeds of 1400MB/s and 1010MB/s respectively will be significantly better than SATA competitors here, they can't match the performance of the fastest SSDs. At the same time, media that supports PCIe 3.0 will work in a PCIe 2.0 slot, but their speed will be significantly reduced.

Overheated SSD drives become slower

Angelbird Wings PX1 PCIe card adapter with its own heatsink prevents Samsung 950 Pro from overheating

Currently, we can expect data transfer rates in excess of 2.5 GB/s from PCIe SSDs. OCZ's M.2 SSDs come standard with a PCIe adapter. According to the results of our measurement results, we see it as more than rational to leave the device in it. We measured the performance of these devices for M.2 and without an adapter, registering slightly worse values: for example, when reading, a speed of only 2382 MB / s was achieved, which is about 130 MB / s less than with the adapter.

Very short reaction time

High data transfer speeds are good for speeding up downloads, but the reason that Windows and games with an SSD drive in a computer run noticeably faster in a computer is hidden primarily in the low latency. During testing, we study it during I / O measurements (Input / Output), that is, counting the number of read or write operations performed per second when processing sequentially located memory blocks. This parameter, the so-called IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), is the missing "ingredient" for a fast PC, which is often heavily loaded.

In this scoring discipline, the OCZ RD400 drive has the advantage with 43,974 IOPS when writing. In reading, on the contrary, the result of 18,428 IOPS is not even half of the previous one. Here, our leader of the rating, Samsung 960, can observe the same heterogeneity of characteristics: when writing, it reaches 42,175 IOPS, and when reading - only 29,233.

An enviable similarity of results is demonstrated by Zotac with its approximately 35,000 IOPS (both reading and writing). However, when comparing products, this parameter often has to be combined with others. At the same time, turbo SSDs should soon “break through” the psychologically important mark of 100,000 IOPS.

The Kingston HyperX Predator performed the worst, with around 23,000 read IOPS and 17,800 write IOPS in last place, by a wide margin. The main reason for this is outdated technology, since this SSD drive still transfers data using the AHCI protocol. The new NVMe access protocol, on the other hand, is optimized to work with SSDs.

The advantages of NVMe manifest themselves primarily in the parallelization of processes: the data transfer protocol allows you to work with queues of input / output requests (I / O queues) up to 65,536 commands in size. The AHCI protocol is limited to only one queue of 32 commands, which can cause data clutter under heavy load.

Top 10 NVMe SSDs Value for Money

Even the new ultra-fast drives are coming down in price, and the cheapest NVMe-enabled SSD can already be found at the price of SATA drives. And this is good news. We have selected for you the 10 best NVMe-enabled SSD flash drives in terms of price / quality ratio.

Typical question from a user

Good afternoon.

Many masters recommend buying an SSD drive for more fast work PC (they even say the computer will turn on in 7-8 seconds). Will it actually increase the speed of work? I looked at sites with SSD drives, they indicate their read and write speed: for example, 535/545 MB / s and a SATA 6Gbit / s connection interface.

And how can I find out the current speed of my HDD in order to roughly estimate how much the speed will increase, and in general, is there any point in using an SSD? Thank you in advance for your response.

Good day.

It is true that after installing an SSD, the responsiveness and boot speed of a computer (laptop) will increase. I will break your "big" question into small ones and answer each of them. I think that it will be more convenient for perception (both for you and other users).

And so, let's get started...

To help!

If your disk slows down, loaded at 100%, I recommend that you read this article:

Questions about the speed of SSD, HDD

Question 1: what utilities and programs will be needed to test the speed of HDD, SSD?

Answer:

Perhaps this is the first thing to start with. There are many such utilities, the choice is wide. Personally, I recommend choosing a couple of utilities from the same manufacturer, we are talking about: CrystalDiskMark and CrystalDiskInfo. It is in them that I will show how, what and where to click further in the article.

CrystalDiskMark/CrystalDiskInfo

Site:

Utilities can be downloaded on one page. Allows you to test the speed of the drive, view the temperature of the drive, the connection interface, SMART readings and much more. Supports both HDD drives and newfangled solid-state SSDs. Works in all versions of Windows: XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 (32|64 bits).

By the way, there are portable versions available that do not need to be installed (i.e. you just need to run it and you can work). It is also worth noting the support of the Russian language. In general, irreplaceable utilities for working with disks.

Question 2: how to check disk speed in CrystalDiskMark?

Answer:

I skip downloading and installing the utility. Next you need:

1. close all programs that load the hard drive (torrents, download managers, graphic editor etc.);
2. in the settings window, select the number of write and read cycles (the optimal number is 5, and it is set by default in the utility at the first start, see the screenshot below);
3. specify the file size for the test (the optimal number of 1GiB is also set in the utility);
4. select a disk for the test (most often viewed system disk"C:\" because the responsiveness of Windows depends on it);
5. final touch - press the button ALL and wait for the results. Do not work for a PC during the test!

Findings:

1. The Read column is the read speed from disk;
2. The Write column is the write speed to disk;
3. In most cases, they look and navigate by the line "SeqQ32T1" (the very first one) - this is the sequential write / read speed. Those. work speed HDD drive in the screenshot above is approximately 100 MB\s;
4. By the way, for a modern SSD drive, the sequential read speed should be at least 500 MB / s (provided that it is connected via SATA-3.0, a few words about this below);
5. If you do not justify the low speed (for example, after buying an SSD - it remained "by eye" the same as with an HDD) - check the SATA drive mode (see question 3 below).

Question 3: how to determine the mode of operation SATA hard disk? Connection interface...

Answer:

To get detailed information about your drive and its mode of operation, just run the CrystalDiskInfo utility (it was recommended at the beginning of the article).

As for the SATA operating mode, just look at the "Transfer Mode" line. Let me break down a couple of things:

1. SATA/600 | SATA/600: left - current mode, right - supported;
2. SATA/600 - this means the drive operates in SATA 3.0 mode, max. theor. speed 600 MB / s (note: SATA 6Gbit / s - this is usually written on disks);
3. SATA/300 - this means the drive operates in SATA 2.0 mode, max. speed 300 MB/s (SATA 3Gbit/s);
4. Example: if you connect an SSD drive to an old PC with SATA 2.0 support, in the "Transfer Mode" line you will see "SATA/300 | SATA/600"- i.e. the current mode is 300 MB/s, but the drive can potentially run at 600 MB/s (if connected to another PC).

Question 4: what is the difference in speed between SSD and HDD?

Answer:

It depends on which computer... If you have an old PC that does not support SATA 3.0, then you will not be able to get maximum performance from an SSD drive...

In general, on average, the sequential read / write speed of an SSD drive is 5 times higher than that of an HDD (see the screenshot below, you can keep silent about other indicators ☺). I think this screenshot is enough to roughly estimate: for example, if your PC used to boot in 60 seconds. - then after installing the SSD: it will become approximately in 12-15 seconds ...

Question 5: Is it true that SSD drives don't last long?

Answer:

In my opinion, rumors that SSDs quickly fail and do not last long are a kind of "myth". The fact is that an SSD drive has a certain number of write-rewrite cycles. When they are exhausted, nothing more can be written to the disk (only read). If you specifically run "cunningly invented" utilities to "rape" the disk (permanent recording), then it is quite possible to quickly disable it.

For the rest, it is not. For example, the screenshot below shows official data from the manufacturer of SSD drives Kingston. For a 240 GB disk, you can write about 80 TB (which is about 80,000 GB!).

In turn, by simple calculations, you can get that when recording 20 GB per day (for example, a couple of games, movies), the disk will last about 10 years! In 10 years, most likely, your computer (laptop) on which you work will be a rarity, and perhaps SSD drives will already be replaced by even newer devices. A very decent period of work, in my humble opinion.

Therefore, my personal point of view is that an SSD drive will live no less than the same HDD (note: for the average user of the "middle hand").

Question 6: Windows boot time will become 8 seconds, right?

Answer:

Yes and no. The fact is that it is difficult to say how long your Windows OS will boot, because. many factors influence this: what will be the real speed of the new SSD drive, how many and what programs you have in autoload, Windows version, whether it is optimized, etc.

By the way, about optimizing Windows, I recommend that you read this article:

Here is one example in the photo below: after installation SSD system(Windows 7) began to boot in 15 seconds, instead of 49. In my opinion, a very good acceleration.

Also a very revealing example: while one WOW player is waiting for the game to load, the other has already started playing and is flying on a griffin...

Question 7: Is it worth switching to an SSD drive? Its main advantages...

Answer:

Perhaps, here everyone decides for himself. My opinion, if there are funds, then, of course, it is worth it (at least for the system disk with Windows). I will give the main advantages, and comment on them, and then decide for yourself. ☺

1. Noiselessness. Many hard drives crack during operation, which is very annoying (especially at night). SSD drive is a priori silent!
2. Higher speed of work (this is the whole article, I won’t comment anymore);
3. Low weight: especially true for laptops that need to be carried around;
4. Less power consumption: also relevant for laptops, the battery will last 10-15% longer on average after replacing the HDD with an SSD;
5. Not so much afraid of shaking and vibration;
6. Not subject to overheating;
7. No need to defragment.

Question 8: Now SSD M2 drives have begun to appear (which are several times faster than SATA drives). Is it worth switching to them?

Answer:

Firstly, SSD drives M2 can be different: both SATA and PCI-E (SATA version works exactly at the same speed as classic SSDs). If we talk about modern SSD M2 (NVMe) - then yes, in synthetic tests they show 5 times better performance than SSD (SATA III). Screenshot of the test is below.

To help!

SSD M2 - how to choose a drive (subtleties with SATA and PCI-E, 2242, 2260, 2280, and keys) -

However, in practice (in real tasks) - the difference in speed is not so obvious. For example, various Word documents, Excel, etc. "little things" will open on SSD (NVMe) as instantly as on SSD SATA. At Windows boot- you can win 3-5 seconds, some game levels will load faster (for example, WOW on the screen below: 15 seconds versus 13 seconds; but this is not so significant (in my opinion)).

In general, to summarize: after switching from HDD to SSD (SATA) - you will notice a significant acceleration of your computer; after switching from SSD (SATA) to SSD M2 (NVMe) - the acceleration is not so obvious (and noticeable only when performing certain tasks).

On this note, I end the article.

Hello! I think it's no secret that one of the most important components inside your computer or laptop is the drive that contains the operating system. A completely logical consequence is the question - how to perform a hard drive speed test (or SSD, if the computer is fresher).

If your operating system is installed on a slow hard drive, then it doesn't matter how powerful your CPU or RAM- Windows itself and installed programs will be launched very reluctantly and you will not be able to enjoy full-fledged multitasking.

In the age of the Internet, there are quite a lot of publications that will tell you about almost any drive model on sale. In addition, there are a huge number of programs for checking the speed of a hard drive, the result of which will be an understanding of what your drive is capable of.

There are many paid utilities like PCMark or PassMark that can test the entire system and quite often they can be found in tests from well-known publications. We are on a different path and I will tell you about four free ways to test hard speed disk or solid state drive.

The actual performance of an HDD or SSD in a Windows environment (and not only) is determined not only by the speed of rotation of a magnetic disk or memory chips of a drive, but also by many other important factors. The drive controller, the SATA version on the motherboard, the drivers of the controller itself, the mode of operation (ACHI or IDE) - all this affects the performance of the disk subsystem (even the CPU or RAM can affect performance)

Method 1. CrystalDiskMark is our main tool

Probably the most popular hard drive speed test tool is CrystalDiskMark. Almost no drive testing is complete without this utility - this situation will help you compare your results and draw the right conclusions. A big plus is the ability of the program to test not only HDD / SSD, but also flash drives and other storage media.

The application has both a distribution kit and a portable version that does not require installation. You can download it as usual on the official website (as always, I recommend portable).

Working with CrystalDiskMark is outrageously easy. We launch the utility, select the size of the test block (in the picture below we chose 1 GB), the number of test repetitions (I chose 5 - the more repetitions, the more accurate the result) and the drive itself. Press the “all” button and wait until the program runs all the tests (by the way, you can run a separate test for each mode).

In the screenshot on the left is the SSD speed test, and on the right is the HDD. Just so you know how big the difference is between the two and how much performance you will get by replacing just one component in the system.

Method 2. CrystalDiskInfo - detailed information about the HDD / SSD drive

At the very beginning of the note, I already wrote that the speed test of a hard drive or SSD will not be entirely correct if we do not find out the factors affecting the performance of the disk subsystem. The CrystalDiskInfo utility will tell you a lot of interesting things about your drive, but we are only interested in one thing - download the application from the official website and run it.

Pay attention to the line "Transfer mode", in the picture below I have it (SATA / 600 | SATA / 600). These parameters must match, i.e. by connecting the SSD drive to the SATA / 300 port (this is the SATA II standard), then we will get a maximum exchange rate of 300 MB with the disk, and if we look at the performance test in the first method, we see that the maximum read speed was well over 300 ...

By connecting such a high-speed drive to a SATA or SATA II port, its performance will simply rest on the performance of the controller (with classic HDDs it is not so critical, since even SATA capabilities are more than enough)

In general, CrystalDiskInfo can tell you about the temperature, the operating time of the drive, and many other useful indicators. For owners of classic HDDs, the Reallocate Sector item will be useful - thanks to it, you can predict the failure of the device

Method 3. AS SSD Benchmark - a healthy competitor to CrystalDisk from the Germans

The Germans know how to make not only films for adults, but also excellent utilities for testing the speed of a hard drive or SSD. In this case, I want to introduce you to the AS SSD Benchmark application, the functionality of which is very similar to CrystalDiskMark, but unlike it, it also shows the data access time (and in general there are still minor differences).

You can download it from the official site (it's in German, download link at the end of the page), the application itself has English(many bloggers have a version exclusively in German)

The utility is portable and does not require installation, just run the application, mark the necessary tests and press START, just like in the first method. On the left is my home SSD, on the right is a classic HDD.

Please note that in the TOOLS menu there are a couple of interesting tests that can predict the performance of the drive when copying ISO files, programs or various toys - CrystalDiskMark does not have such functionality.

Method 4. HD Tune is a good tool with a visual graph

HD Tune is probably the most well-known hard drive speed test app, but it's in last place in today's rankings for a reason. The fact is that free version HD Tune hasn't been updated since February 2008... however it still works in 2k17 on the latest Windows 10. You can download it as always from the official site (no portable version unfortunately)

After passing the test, we will have access to a visual reading graph (along with the maximum and minimum values, as well as the speed of data access). In general, the information is useful, but there is no way to test the speed of writing to a disk, which is a bit disappointing ...

In view of its antiquities the application may incorrectly detect modern drives, but this does not affect the test results in any way

Conclusion about programs for testing hard drive speed

It's time to draw conclusions. We performed a hard drive or SSD speed test using four different programs (or rather, there are only three applications for testing, and another utility to make sure that the tests will be objective).

In reality, programs that allow you to check the speed of a hard drive are many times larger, but I decided to introduce you to the leaders of this niche ... but if you have something to add, I'm waiting for you in the comments.