Posted by Kromey at 8:55pm Sep 2 '11Bigger caches, and you can occasionally find a 12,000 rpm HDD for sale (but I wouldn't get one of those), and capacity continues to grow, of course.
What's really interesting to me about HDDs is that they seem to increase capacity without decreasing their average seek time.
Anyway, the caches are the biggest thing -- they basically use RAM chips on the hard drive, and we all know how amazingly speedy RAM is. This gives them blazingly-fast access to your most-used, or most-recently-used (depending on how intelligent the cache is), data. Meanwhile, they are getting better at moving those arms across the platters, and seek times are slowly improving overall.
SSDs, in theory, should be faster than HDDs. And certainly they are more consistent -- their min, max, and average seeks times are basically the same, but those values can have a wide variance on an HDD.
In practice, though, SSDs perform no better -- and in many cases, often worse! -- than HDDs in benchmarks (see link below for an old one; I can't find a more recent comparison at the moment). I don't know why. Maybe SSDs just haven't matured yet into their full potential -- they certainly seem like they should be faster.
Look at seek times, and look at caches (the first couple generations of SSDs decided for some reason they didn't need on-disk caches, and suffered greatly for it; some still seem to think they don't need it); find the fastest seek times with the largest caches, and that's probably going to be your best-performing drive. Also pay attention to reviews, because oftentimes -- especially with SSDs -- the manufacturer-rated seek time is far from a complete and accurate picture.
It's also been the experience of the IT department I now work in that SSDs fail more often than HDDs -- in fact, despite having far more of the latter in service, we replace many more of the former!
My advice is to stick with the tried-and-true mechanical drives for now; SSDs will be superior in the future, almost certainly the near future, but for now they just aren't there yet, not in practice anyway.
What's really interesting to me about HDDs is that they seem to increase capacity without decreasing their average seek time.
Anyway, the caches are the biggest thing -- they basically use RAM chips on the hard drive, and we all know how amazingly speedy RAM is. This gives them blazingly-fast access to your most-used, or most-recently-used (depending on how intelligent the cache is), data. Meanwhile, they are getting better at moving those arms across the platters, and seek times are slowly improving overall.
SSDs, in theory, should be faster than HDDs. And certainly they are more consistent -- their min, max, and average seeks times are basically the same, but those values can have a wide variance on an HDD.
In practice, though, SSDs perform no better -- and in many cases, often worse! -- than HDDs in benchmarks (see link below for an old one; I can't find a more recent comparison at the moment). I don't know why. Maybe SSDs just haven't matured yet into their full potential -- they certainly seem like they should be faster.
Look at seek times, and look at caches (the first couple generations of SSDs decided for some reason they didn't need on-disk caches, and suffered greatly for it; some still seem to think they don't need it); find the fastest seek times with the largest caches, and that's probably going to be your best-performing drive. Also pay attention to reviews, because oftentimes -- especially with SSDs -- the manufacturer-rated seek time is far from a complete and accurate picture.
It's also been the experience of the IT department I now work in that SSDs fail more often than HDDs -- in fact, despite having far more of the latter in service, we replace many more of the former!
My advice is to stick with the tried-and-true mechanical drives for now; SSDs will be superior in the future, almost certainly the near future, but for now they just aren't there yet, not in practice anyway.
Link: Click Here
Not a whole lot, nope - Kromey