SSD Beats HDD Hands Down
Posted: July 2, 2010 | Author: simeshev | Filed under: Hardware | Leave a comment »A performance test of my new Solid State Drive (SSD) shows that it is about 4 times faster than a SATA HDD.
An SSD is just a fancy name for a bunch of Flash chips stacked into a 2.5″ SATA body. Recently I have become a happy owner of a 160Gb SSD by Intel. I have installed it into a Mac Pro (my main development machine) using an awesome converter from 2.5″ to 3.5″ from NewEgg [1]. On Mac moving to the new drive was just a matter or replacing the old drive with the SSD and restoring it from TimeMachine.
First things I have noticed have been practically instantaneous boot and a palpable increase in build speed. Mac Pros are as fast as it gets, but with the SSD my system has become just snappy. Rather quiet yet discernible chirping of HDD heads has gone as well.
Running XBench [3] has produced astonishing benchmarks. According to XBench score, the SSD turned out to be 4 times faster than the SATA HDD, with some operations being 8 (!) times faster. Here is a side-by-side comparison:
This is so cool! Certainly, SSDs are still pretty pricey (mine is $429 at NewEgg [3]), but the performance gain is worth every penny. To me, HDDs are on the way out.
References
1. Converter 2.5″ to 3.5″ from NewEgg
2. XBench