truth in advertising
whether it's the tact on resort fees from your last vegas vacation or that
photo of the big mac that looks nothing like the burger you'll be eating the
corporations are always finding new misleading ways to market their products
and this is no less true in the tech world especially when it comes to ssds
so sabrint sponsored this video demystifying some of the SSD marketing
that's out there now don't get me wrong when companies claim that ssds are
faster than traditional hard drives they are definitely right about that the
issue is that typically the numbers on the spec sheet or the advertisement from
the manufacturer while very impressive sounding and big
in many cases seem to be designed only to make their drive sound incredibly
fast now in this video we discussed
which specs to pay the most attention to when shopping for an SSD for example an
SSD will be able to read or write large
sequential files something like a space hogging video file more quickly than
lots of small more random bits of data
like you would encounter with frequently used programs like web browsers meaning
that the random performance specs are more relevant to the everyday user than
the sequential ones but here's the rub there isn't any kind of
body or industry association that oversees SSD testing and while ssds work
very differently compared to mechanical hard drives and even compared to each
other in many cases oftentimes the exact
same tests are used on hard drives and
ssds you see most quick and dirty drive
benchmarks measure how long it takes for a drive to accomplish some task say
transferring a large file but this kind of work is a lot more
straightforward for a hard drive because fragmentation aside it can simply
overwrite whatever space on the platter is marked as free ssds on the other hand
often need to erase the data first and
move some existing data before new data can be written to a specific block you
can learn more about that up here but basically it adds more time to your SSD
write operations especially if your SSD is getting full and doesn't have as much
free space to work with and while it might not be difficult to measure how
long this process takes the issue is that in the real world people aren't
writing to mostly empty drives which is what many manufacturers use for their
benchmarks instead as your SSD fills up from daily
use there's more and more performance overhead due to data reshuffling which
can cause real world speeds to drop off dramatically far below what's listed on
the spec sheet then making matters much worse you have
the fact that the number of random reads in particular that an SSD can do this is
measured in iops is often reported while
the SSD isn't also trying to write much data and in the real world there are
many scenarios where you would be doing both reading and writing at the same
time meaning that these read iops that are reported on the sheet can easily end
up inflated throw in the fact that an increasing
number of ssds employ complex data management and caching algorithms to
boost drive performance beyond what should be possible with the underlying
flash memory under certain conditions
and it can be very unclear exactly what kind of data was used to get the numbers
that you see when you go to buy a drive on amazon or newegg so then does that
mean that SSD manufacturers are all evil and going out of their way to lie to you
well actually probably not it's more likely that because proper SSD
benchmarking is way more difficult and time consuming than testing a hard drive
manufacturers simply can't be bothered to develop and run these complicated
benchmarks versus the quick ones that they do on these mostly empty drives
because it not only spits out impressive looking numbers that look great on the
spec sheet but it also saves them time and resources
and the thing is that so far this is only even bitten a handful of
manufacturers in the butt because the truth is that many people who buy an SSD
just want an easy boost in speed and responsiveness compared to their hard
drive and they may not even care about the exact performance numbers
but anyway let's say you really are concerned about
how a drive stacks up before you buy it well for the discerning buyer we've
linked a couple of websites down below that do more comprehensive drive testing
using methods that closely simulate real-world workloads and then drawing
conclusions from that so grab those reading glasses
and get cracking it takes a bit more effort but this knowledge could come in handy for when
you need peak performance for all that super critical work you do
speaking of peak performance check out the rocket NVMe SSD from our sponsor for
today's video sabrant it uses an m.2
interface so that means it's super small not taking up pretty much any room in
your computer and it supports pci express 3.0 gen 4 so it's super fast
whether you're gaming editing videos or completing projects it also features
advanced wear leveling to ensure that it'll be snappy and reliable for a long
time to come and you can check it out today at the link in the video
description so thanks for watching guys like dislike
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