is the performance of an SSD that great in comparison with a mechanical HDD?

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I'm undecided on whether to upgrade, I don't have the deepest pockets so would probs get something like a 250GB which is not great as I do need my space, however I am wanting a performance boost. I was wondering if I used my SATA HDD externally then used an SSD internally whether this would cater for my needs, I would use the SATA HDD (which is currently in my machine) to host my VMs on, could this setup work? do you think SSD gives that much of a performance boost? The only reason I wouldn't just keep the HDD internally is because I am using a laptop not a desktop PC.

 

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Yes it is, typcial SATA hard disk is quoted as around 55 MB/s, SATA SSD is quoted as around 500 MB/s.

So typically a ~10x speed improvement.

However the real picture is more complex, for random small reads, which are fairly typical, the SSD will be more than 10x faster.

M2 SSD can be as fast as 2500MB/s read, so 50x faster than HDD.

PCIe SSD can be as fast as 5000MB/s read, so 90x faster than HDD. (Although this is using RAID 0 and two 2500MB/s SSDs.)


Anyone still using a HDD for small random reads and writes really is leaving massive performance on the table and using legacy technology.

This before you take into account the extra advantages of an SSD in a laptop :-

1. Smaller and lighter
2. Not susceptible to physical shock damage (Dropping a laptop with HDD could destroy all your data, even if the rest of the laptop still works.)
3. Less power draw / Longer battery life

Yes all my laptops for the last 7 years have had SSD internally and I use a western digital passport over USB3 for larger non essential files.

Generally its better to run VM's from an SSD if you can. Linux VM's can be under 1GB so no trouble there, with work you can get windows down to around 7GB, however generally they grow pretty fast.

 

Same here, I am currently using laptop and will switch my HDD to SSD just because of the performance boost. If you have to the money just don't think twice and upgrade it, make sure you thank me later.

 

I took the plunge and got a 250GB SSD few teething problems but with the help of google and youtube got there in the end, currently installing the OS, went for a clean install as wanted to do everything fresh so just backedup my files to my external HDD. I dont know what to now do with my old HDD might slap an enclosure on it and store it away.

EDIT: took the ssd for a spin and it runs so much better than my old HDD!

 

I'm loathed to ever use a mechanical drive again, just put a new machine together using a Samsung NVMe drive and it benchmarks at 3000MB/s, crazy.

 

Would now never go back to mechanical hdd again!

 

Its important to consider the memory hierarchy.




The further you get from the CPU registers the slower the access times get,
main memory is 100x slower than L3 cache,
SSD is 1000x slower than main memory,
HDD is 200,000x slower than main memory.

Disk I/O is generally the bottleneck in most peoples systems for most practical tasks. Simply because of the huge latency gaps.

The CPU has a instruction and data caches, to fill the cache lower level caches, main memory and ultimately disk must be accessed.
Typically when you get cache misses you get pipeline stalls, if the stall progresses all the way to disk, basically your processor takes a nap waiting for disk access.

Quote :-
"If the instruction required is not available in the cache, then a cache miss occurs, necessitating a fetch from main memory. This is referred to as a pipeline stall and delays processing the next instruction. Information is passed from one stage to the next by means of a storage buffer."

What they don't say is if its not in main memory but its for some reason been paged into virtual memory you get the CPU stalled due to disk access.

More typically we don't get a pipeline stall due to cache miss, but we are simply blocked on system I/O, the OS kernel will then switch to another thread, the context switch however could also cause a cache miss and pipeline stall.

When the performance of the system is largely determined by I/O then we say it is 'I/O Bound'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_bound

 

Another thing to add that I haven't seen mentioned is heat, spinning tin runs far hotter than an SSD and for that reason alone I love using them in my laptops.