Eric Garay

Are Solid State Drives Faster?Saying all SSDs are better is a tricky statement since early JMicron controlled SSDs still in circulation are just slightly faster than standard 7200RPM platter drives. The faster SSDs have Intel, Indilinx, or Samsung controllers which really fly compared to platter drives. You might be shocked by your average transfer rates which directly impact your system’s performance.

If you aren’t convinced, run a benchmark that reveals transfer rates using all the major data block sizes. Don’t be fooled by the “Burst Rate” performance alone. Check both Random and Sequential transfer rates because these effect your system’s performance. A benchmark program like QuickBench will give you the hard drive’s Sequential and Random transfer rates. Compare your results to a performance based SSD recently tested:

128GB SSD w/Indilinx Controller                   500GB SATAII Hard Drive

• 180MB/s Write                  Sequential                        90MB/s Write
• 220MB/s Read                   Sequential                        82MB/s Read
• 108MB/s Write                  Random                            15MB/s Write
• 122MB/s Read                   Random                            21MB/s Read

RAID is another area that already favors SSDs over platter. RAID performance continually increases as you add more and more SSDs to the array. Regular platter RAID is nowhere near as fast and does not increase once you add a 5^th drive to the array. Consider this: just two Patriot TorqX 128GB SSDs will top 400MB/s Write and 450MB/s Read where as a typical 4 drive array will be lucky to reach 200MB/s Write and Read.

So, assuming you don’t have a JMicron controlled SSD on your wish list, we can give this round to the Solid State Drive. Let’s continue.