[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[Daniel Barrett]

On May 7, 2014, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>So, if you had to buy a new 1TB drive and you had a choice between a
>high quality consumer SSD and a mechanical drive...
[qualifier about "same price" omitted]

No contest! (At least for my purposes.)

Here's the result of running "du -shx" on a 3TB Western Digital Red
and a 1TB Crucible consumer SSD with about the same number & size of
files on them. After clearing the disk caches, of course.

Western Digital HD: 46 seconds
Crucible SSD: 8 seconds

Yeah, it's just one read test, and the WD Red probably isn't the
ultimate drive, but in practice the SSD speed is great. (I run two
SSDs in RAID 1 as my primary work drive.)  My VMs feel faster on the
SSD too.

YMMV.

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com