The problem is that the files are not in one piece, you have to look around, or read them randomly.
Generally the average 70m hard disk can be 20m is good.
But if it was a solid state drive, that random 4k run. Kills everything mechanical. So boot speed is absolutely nothing to write home about.
It is too expensive. Even now, it's still expensive. The raid is fast. Random is still no good. But it's better than nothing.
And the capacity is huge.
In recent years, the technology of CPU, GPU, memory and chipset have experienced rapid development. The mechanical hard disk, in addition to the unimaginable growth in capacity back then, is limited by its internal physical structure, the performance development is relatively limited. Today, the performance of the hard disk has become an important bottleneck in the development of computer speed. The development of technology urgently needs a new form of "hard disk" to make the performance of the computer to a higher level.
Solid State Disk (SSD) appeared at this time, the structure is simple, but the performance with mechanical hard disk is not an order of magnitude. In the beginning, due to the high cost of flash memory chips, the capacity of SSD is far from being able to look at the back of its traditional hard disk, so it can be said that it has not really entered the practical stage. And, the price was not affordable.
In recent years, as the cost of flash memory chips continues to fall and the process continues to improve, SSDs are becoming more affordable with larger capacities. The growth of players using SSDs has been phenomenal, with a tendency to replace traditional mechanical hard disks at the high end.
For most personal PCs, should we use SSDs if we have a limited budget? How much faster can I speed up my system with an SSD? I'm afraid that senior DIY players are unable to give a definitive answer to this question, and today I'm going to do a simple test for the game and a few common system applications to remove a cloud of doubt from the DIY.
SSD technical advantages
Before the test, we first look at the advantages of SSD technology compared to traditional hard disk.
First of all, the performance difference is that SSDs work on a completely different principle than traditional hard drives, and the biggest performance advantage is that there is virtually no seek time problem. Determined by its working principle and physical structure, a mechanical hard drive requires frequent actuation of the magnetic heads for the seek process. If a file is fragmented, the hard drive's read/write speeds are significantly reduced, while SSDs remain robust.
There's also an average latency time that governs hard drive performance. This refers to the time it takes for the heads to find the track where the data is stored and then continue to search for the sector where the data is located. The average latency time can usually be reduced by increasing the speed of the hard disk. Except that a speed increase brings with it a host of issues such as stability, heat dissipation, and noise. Currently, consumer hard drives are only available in 7200rpm, and 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm are usually only found in the server segment.
Seek time + latency time make up the average access time of a hard disk. This metric affects the performance of the drive in question. In the SATA drives we've tested so far, average access times have generally been 15ms or more. SSDs, on the other hand, almost do not have the concept of access time, in the test software, the average storage time of SSDs is often "<0.1ms". Therefore, the manufacturer's technical staff also said that SSD performance and traditional hard disk performance "is not in an order of magnitude".
In addition, due to the physical structure, mode of operation, storage media and other completely different, SSD both sustained transfer rate and IOPS than mechanical hard disk has an amazing performance increase. In addition to the performance factor, SSDs have no mechanical structure, generate much less heat, and have virtually no vibration or noise, which is also unmatched by mechanical hard drives. Getting back to the point, how much of a performance boost will a high-performance SSD bring to our PCs during use? Here's how to put it to the test.
Participating platforms and products in detail
Before we get started, here's a quick description of the platforms we're testing.
● Seagate 7200.12 Dual Disk 1TB Hard Drive
Seagate's hard drive is part of the new Barracuda 7200.12 series, and features a dual-disk design with a 500GB single-disk capacity, and is available under the model number ST31000528AS, where ST stands for Seagate and 3 stands for 3.3GHz. The model number is "ST31000528AS", where ST stands for Seagate, 3 stands for 3.5-inch desktop hard disk, 1000 stands for hard disk capacity of 1000GB, and AS stands for this hard disk is SATA interface.
This product must be very familiar to all of us, and many of our friends may be using this very hard disk at home, so we chose it for this test.
The Seagate 7200.12 1TB has an average latency of 4.17ms, a random read seek time of less than 8.5ms, a random write seek time of less than 9.5ms, an average power consumption of 11.6W for seek, 12W for read/write, and 8W for idle, a noise level of 28dBA for seek and 27dBA for idle, and an annual failure rate of 0.34%.
● SSD S599
Adata S599 SSD
The 2.5-inch S599 is equipped with the latest SandForce SF-1200 controller and uses new MLC NAND flash memory, with a nominal maximum read/write speeds of 280MB/S and 270MB/S respectively, which is relatively middle-of-the-road in terms of performance, and can represent the SSD's overall level, and secondly, this hard disk is relatively affordable, the market is quite a lot of volume, so this test chose it.
The ADATA S599 is also shock-proof, and the built-in Error Correction Code (ECC: Auto Error Correction) feature automatically detects error messages for users.
The main controller for the ADATA S599 SSD is the SF-1200 controller, model number "SF-1222TA3-SBH", which is available in either a 128-pin TQFP package (14 x 14mm) or a 361-pin TFBGA package (13 x 13mm). With a sustained read speed of 250MB/s and a sustained write speed of 200MB/s under 128K blocks, and 5000 on-the-fly read/write IOPS under 4K blocks, the device consumes 550mW of typical power, 250mW of idle power, and 50mW of hibernation power, and has an MTBF of up to 10 million hours, with an endurance temperature of 0-70°C, and in addition, supports 128-bit AES encryption.
PCMark & HD Tune Theoretical Performance Test
PCmark, as the definitive test software for overall machine performance, has always been a benchmark for comprehensive computer performance. However, the testing process is very lengthy, and our test was designed to examine hard drive performance, and the theoretical test was only a slight reference, so we didn't run through all of the process, just selecting the hard drive-related items in it.
Mechanical hard drive test score: 2106
Solid state drive test score: 4448
The following is another professional hard drive test software, the familiar HD Tune, which can visualize the performance of the hard drive with graphs and charts, and the operation is also very simple.
Mean mechanical hard drive speed: 100.7MB
Mean SSD speed: 191.7MB
You can see a clear difference in performance between the mainstream SSDs and the mainstream mechanical hard drives, and the huge difference in access times is a big reason for the disparity in performance. SSDs are much faster at reading small, trivial files than traditional mechanical drives. That's why in PCMark and HD Tune tests, SSDs win by a wide margin, with performance that's more than double that of traditional hard drives.
Everyday use: Booting and installing software
It's likely that you've seen more than enough of the theoretical performance tests above, so let's get down to the nitty-gritty of the test, which is the everyday use speed test.
Booting up a PC is a necessary part of using a computer, so many people are so concerned about waiting just a few tens of seconds that some software uses the measurement of boot speed as a marketing ace. But it's difficult to accurately measure the time before entering the system with software, so we tested this test from the start of the self-test to enter the desktop pinch table test, the results are more reasonable, the estimated error is within 1 second.
With a computer that naturally requires a lot of software to be installed, it's essential to test this program, so let's just test the time it takes to install the NVIDIA graphics card driver.
Power on speed using SSD as the system disk is really very fast, four-leaf color window flash, from start to finish only used 22 seconds desktop has been presented in front of us. Load software SSD is still far ahead, about 44% faster than mechanical hard disk, very powerful.
Game loading test: WARIII RPG & Crysis
Friends interested in the game naturally every day less game loading, no matter what the game, there will be loading wait, and choose a different hard disk will have an impact on the loading time?
We chose the familiar WARIII and Crysis to test.
WARIII RPG Nobunaga
WARIII RPG Guardian of the Sword
Crysis screenshot
The game's load times improved slightly with SSDs, but the effect wasn't very noticeable. It seems that hard drive speed is only part of the equation, and that CPU and RAM speeds are also critical to game loading times.
File decompression and video transcoding tests
Decompression and video transcoding speeds are also a frequent concern for many people, especially those who like HD, so how much does the hard drive affect these applications?
The test results were a bit surprising, as faster hard drives had no effect at all on video transcoding. The SSD's contribution to speed in decompression was also largely negligible. It seems like switching to an SSD won't help much if you want these apps to be faster.
PhotoShop 2D image processing test
The magic of PS has long been a faithful companion to the vast majority of photographers, and as the number of pixels on digital cameras has soared, the processing speed of computers has been challenged like never before. Below, I've chosen a large image with over 100 million pixels to test and see if the hard disk can contribute to the post-processing speed of the photo.
From the results above, it's easy to see that SSDs still have an impact on PS, and the acceleration time for different effects varies. After analyzing the results, it's easy to see that the simpler the process, the greater the proportion of the total processing time spent reading, so it seems that PS enthusiasts have an SSD is still very necessary.
Can it get any faster? 3D gaming performance tests
The newest and most authoritative test for 3D gaming performance is undoubtedly 3DMARK11, and we've also chosen Crysis to back it up.
The SSD did not help at all with 3DMARK11, and it seems that all programs are pre-read into memory to run, which is in line with my previous guess.
The same goes for Crysis, which saw no improvement at all, and it seems that hitting the hard drive's attention to play the game smoothly is a complete fiasco. But for games that require frequent map readings during scenarios, there was a small improvement.
SSD big development? Merchants and buyers of the game
Just now the item-by-item test all the way through, I'm afraid we can not remember, it does not matter, the last small summary of the results will be organized in the following table.
From the above summary, it is easy to see that in most applications, SSDs have made more or less progress compared to traditional hard disks.
SSDs can be the icing on the cake when it comes to performance, and if the overall configuration of the computer is high end and you want to make a breakthrough, then you must use an SSD. On the other hand, it is not necessary to spend thousands of dollars in pursuit of a solid state hard drive.
From an application point of view, the SSD's ultra-high data transfer rate allows for a qualitative improvement in overall machine speed, while the traditional hard drive does not create a bottleneck in 3D game play, video transcoding, and other aspects of the traditional hard drive, and then the use of SSDs does not improve.
At present, SSDs have been widely used in military, automotive, industrial control, video surveillance, network monitoring, network terminals, electric power, medical, aviation navigation equipment, as well as high-end notebooks and tablet PCs sweeping the globe. the IT industry's views are surprisingly consistent, Intel, Samsung, Seagate and other manufacturers coincidentally believe that SSDs will show an explosive growth between two to three years.
The author believes that, for manufacturers, a new hardware means that from research and development to logistics and sales of the entire industrial chain of huge benefits, tend to be not surprising, but for consumers is another story. Admittedly, the hard disk made of an array of solid-state electronic storage chips has the advantages of fast speed, durability, shock resistance, no noise, light weight, etc., but for desktop PCs is still a chicken ribs, and its capacity is too constrained to make it a short-term replacement for the traditional HDD hard disk.