SSD vs Hard Drive Torture Test
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,341 words · ~6 min read
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with its factory tuning and data center dna an Intel 730 series SSD is an
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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts
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so how fast is a hard drive compared to
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an SSD i mean you can go read a spec sheet or look at the charts and graphs
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on fantastic sites like storage review but if you look carefully there's
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something you'll notice about the way that ssds and hard drives always get
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compared to each other it always starts with the reviewer loading up a fresh os
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putting on all the latest drivers and installing only the applications that
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are needed for benchmarking so what we're seeing is the best case scenario
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for any device but that's not the way that people actually use their computers
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they get malware and remove it they install programs and uninstall them and
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but that leaves remnants they upgrade their hardware and the older driver junk
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is left over and they have random crap running in the background that they
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don't even remember the purpose of so while a sanitized scientific approach is
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the best way to objectively measure the performance of the hardware what it
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isn't is a way to represent to people what the real difference in performance
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between a hard drive and an SSD might look like two three or however many
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years down the road when the hard drive is going to be really struggling to keep
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up with all that clutter something that ssds handle much much better so luke and
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i sat down and devised a test to show the other end of the spectrum the worst
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case scenario for both devices for science
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in the hard drive corner we've got a seagate barracuda one terabyte that has
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had this Windows 7 operating system more on that later running on it for almost
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five years representing ssds we've got
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the Corsair neutron 512. we went with this drive because we feel like it
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represents a good balance between price performance and capacity something that
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we need because our hard drive was about half full to begin the test and we
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wanted to be able to clone everything over there which leads us into the methodology
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that Windows 7 install is one broken piece of poo it's running in ide mode it
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has undergone several platform changes between originally being installed on
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n46 and the x79 bench that we're using
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today it's dual booted with four to five Linux distros with a variety of boot
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loaders used throughout it and a triple boot setup with Linux and os 10
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attempted at one point and it's run every generation of NVIDIA graphics
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cards from the 8800 series to the 7000
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series and the objective of all of this is to determine once and for all is there more
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to the SSD performance story than boot times on a fresh os can an SSD
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actually justify its much higher cost to
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storage ratio even for affordable ones like this one
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in a worst case scenario torture test have all those people who upgraded just
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been deluding themselves about how much better things were when they cloned
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their old os to a new SSD to find out what kind of difference a
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hard drive user might observe in the real world
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this is what we did take it away luke
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to elaborate on what Linus was talking about this operating system has been through
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kind of a lot it wasn't just a test drive this was actually my daily driver
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for a long time and because of that i've done registry edits like crazy i've
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played with boot animations i've dual booted it beside everything under the
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sun it's gone through every series of NVIDIA card and a lot of AMD ones uh
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since 8000 series NVIDIA it started on n46 and i've tried a whole bunch of
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different platforms on AMD and Intel sides since then
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um yeah it was sat at the top of my mineral
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oil rig i've had it since high school it's been through basically everything
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as far as i can remember and we're gonna see how it fares so the
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first thing i did was i booted it up on the x79 platform i ran Windows update
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for a while which took freaking forever i downloaded installed all the latest
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drivers and necessary benchmarking software that i needed i then cloned the
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drive over to the SSD with both drives running the same frankenstein absolutely
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crap worst as possible scenario operating system the only thing left was
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to see the performance difference between the hardware in this kind of
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torture test scenario our first benchmark is going to be based around
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restarting so i click the restart button and instantly start timing at that point
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then we time it until it gets all the way through reboot and is able to open
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pc mark 8. modern os's are optimized for hard drives hybrid drives ssds whatever
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in terms of booting and that's why your new pc boots up so quickly that didn't
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really help here a ton as you'll see our
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next test was to uninstall a program i chose openoffice for this and the
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objective was to see how long it takes to uninstall this program while using
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the computer in the background so while i was running this i was opening control
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panel looking at different things and just random web browsing online as
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techtips.com about every five ish seconds i would do a new action that was
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about it and it took a really long time for the hard drive to uninstall that
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program last off i tried to run pc mark 8 and it ran fine on the SSD but it
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crashed on the hard drive i really don't think that's pc mark 8's
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problem the hard drive probably just screwed up to be completely honest so we
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didn't bother including those results because they're inconclusive thank you
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to future mark for providing the code anyways i'm sure if my hard drive wasn't
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as screwed up it would probably work just fine so instead of running that
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test what i did was i made it calculate all the folders within my c drive to see
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how long that took and that was again kind of a fairly hilarious result
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alright guys i hope you liked this kind of like odd weird contrasty situation we
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just kind of noticed that i had this hard drive since forever and just wanted
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to kind of see what we could do with it so i hope you guys liked that if you did
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like it like the video and subscribe if you didn't like it dislike the video and
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subscribe anyways we'll make something you like eventually comment on the down
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