Handling the Truth about Solid State Drives

Handling The Truth About Solid State Drives

By Michael Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-08-23

The Tech Report came out with a detailed comparison of SSDs and traditional HDDs. Warning: you may not be able to handle the truth.

With a strong representation of the cream of the crop in both SSDs and traditional hard drives, the benchmarks began. TR's testing was certainly thorough, covering a wide range of benchmarking programs and their own in-house tests. They compiled their results into various graphs, and, by doing so, gave an accurate graphical representation of said results. The final report spans pages, and is not worth going over in full detail here. However, The Tech Report's assertions about these results were an earth shattering blow against many's SSD beliefs: boot-up times are not significantly faster. However, a few flaws exist in their tests:

1) Clean Installs. There appears to be no information concerning anything to fragment the hard drive. The benchmarks used for random seeks is where the SSDs excelled the most in this group of tests, and that result is consistent with the actual SSD technology. I noticed an immediate improvement when I first installed my SSD, however, the boot-up times not only benefited from the faster drive, but also a clean OS install. The speedy boot-up times have held up over time, which is something I doubt would have been true if I had a traditional hard drive. The Tech Report's test would likely have been much more interesting if they somehow randomly scattered (representing disk fragmentation) the OS and startup applications across the drive.

2) POST. The power on self test of the motherboards was included in the boot-up times. These tests often can take up to a full minute on some motherboards, so this built-in buffer gave traditional hard-drives a larger fixed time from which to skew comparisons, i.e. comparing 15 to 30 is significantly different from comparing 115 to 130.

Overall, the Tech Report recommends SSDs for various implementations, but shows the kinks in its armor. Be sure to check out their results in more detail before purchasing a SSD or traditional HDD.

About the Author:
Michael Marr is a IT staff Writer for WebProNews.