with its factory tuning and data center dna an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts
so how fast is a hard drive compared to
an SSD i mean you can go read a spec sheet or look at the charts and graphs
on fantastic sites like storage review but if you look carefully there's
something you'll notice about the way that ssds and hard drives always get
compared to each other it always starts with the reviewer loading up a fresh os
putting on all the latest drivers and installing only the applications that
are needed for benchmarking so what we're seeing is the best case scenario
for any device but that's not the way that people actually use their computers
they get malware and remove it they install programs and uninstall them and
but that leaves remnants they upgrade their hardware and the older driver junk
is left over and they have random crap running in the background that they
don't even remember the purpose of so while a sanitized scientific approach is
the best way to objectively measure the performance of the hardware what it
isn't is a way to represent to people what the real difference in performance
between a hard drive and an SSD might look like two three or however many
years down the road when the hard drive is going to be really struggling to keep
up with all that clutter something that ssds handle much much better so luke and
i sat down and devised a test to show the other end of the spectrum the worst
case scenario for both devices for science
in the hard drive corner we've got a seagate barracuda one terabyte that has
had this Windows 7 operating system more on that later running on it for almost
five years representing ssds we've got
the Corsair neutron 512. we went with this drive because we feel like it
represents a good balance between price performance and capacity something that
we need because our hard drive was about half full to begin the test and we
wanted to be able to clone everything over there which leads us into the methodology
that Windows 7 install is one broken piece of poo it's running in ide mode it
has undergone several platform changes between originally being installed on
n46 and the x79 bench that we're using
today it's dual booted with four to five Linux distros with a variety of boot
loaders used throughout it and a triple boot setup with Linux and os 10
attempted at one point and it's run every generation of NVIDIA graphics
cards from the 8800 series to the 7000
series and the objective of all of this is to determine once and for all is there more
to the SSD performance story than boot times on a fresh os can an SSD
actually justify its much higher cost to
storage ratio even for affordable ones like this one
in a worst case scenario torture test have all those people who upgraded just
been deluding themselves about how much better things were when they cloned
their old os to a new SSD to find out what kind of difference a
hard drive user might observe in the real world
this is what we did take it away luke
to elaborate on what Linus was talking about this operating system has been through
kind of a lot it wasn't just a test drive this was actually my daily driver
for a long time and because of that i've done registry edits like crazy i've
played with boot animations i've dual booted it beside everything under the
sun it's gone through every series of NVIDIA card and a lot of AMD ones uh
since 8000 series NVIDIA it started on n46 and i've tried a whole bunch of
different platforms on AMD and Intel sides since then
um yeah it was sat at the top of my mineral
oil rig i've had it since high school it's been through basically everything
as far as i can remember and we're gonna see how it fares so the
first thing i did was i booted it up on the x79 platform i ran Windows update
for a while which took freaking forever i downloaded installed all the latest
drivers and necessary benchmarking software that i needed i then cloned the
drive over to the SSD with both drives running the same frankenstein absolutely
crap worst as possible scenario operating system the only thing left was
to see the performance difference between the hardware in this kind of
torture test scenario our first benchmark is going to be based around
restarting so i click the restart button and instantly start timing at that point
then we time it until it gets all the way through reboot and is able to open
pc mark 8. modern os's are optimized for hard drives hybrid drives ssds whatever
in terms of booting and that's why your new pc boots up so quickly that didn't
really help here a ton as you'll see our
next test was to uninstall a program i chose openoffice for this and the
objective was to see how long it takes to uninstall this program while using
the computer in the background so while i was running this i was opening control
panel looking at different things and just random web browsing online as
techtips.com about every five ish seconds i would do a new action that was
about it and it took a really long time for the hard drive to uninstall that
program last off i tried to run pc mark 8 and it ran fine on the SSD but it
crashed on the hard drive i really don't think that's pc mark 8's
problem the hard drive probably just screwed up to be completely honest so we
didn't bother including those results because they're inconclusive thank you
to future mark for providing the code anyways i'm sure if my hard drive wasn't
as screwed up it would probably work just fine so instead of running that
test what i did was i made it calculate all the folders within my c drive to see
how long that took and that was again kind of a fairly hilarious result
alright guys i hope you liked this kind of like odd weird contrasty situation we
just kind of noticed that i had this hard drive since forever and just wanted
to kind of see what we could do with it so i hope you guys liked that if you did
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