HDD and SSD compared

Update: Back in 2009 I was confronted with a choice: should my new Macbook Pro contain a SSD or a traditional HDD. I did some minor research on the matter and wrote about it on my blog. This is a translated—and minor updated—article of the originally dutch article I wrote in 2009.

Speed

Back in 2008 Tom’s Hardware did a quick comparison of SDD and HDD performance. The test was conducted with two Macbook Pro’s, one containing a SSD and the other a traditional HDD.

The numbers didn’t lie:

Performance test	HDD	SSD
Boot-time	0:46s	0:24s 52%
Launch Photoshop CS3	0:18s	0:05s 27%
Launch Word 2008	0:24s	0:09s 38%

As you can see the boot-time of a Macbook Pro with a SSD is more than twice as fast as with a traditional harddrive.

Here is another example with two PC laptops comparing Windows boottimes for both harddrive types.

Noise

“totally silent because they don’t contain moving parts”

Solid State Drives do not contain any moving parts. This means that they are totally silent. Harddrives on the other hand are almost continually making noises when they are busy.

Mechanical reliability

The fact that SSD’s don’t contain moving parts renders them almost immune to mechanical breakdowns. A nice illustration is the following Vibration Test (skip to 1:01):

Energy Usage

Back in 2008 Tom’s Hardware came with a shocking conclusion about energy usage of SSD’s. SSD’s were to supposed to be less energy consuming, but the opposite was proved in their tests.

Price

As of October 2010, SSDs cost about $1.40–2.00 per GB. For HDDs a gigabyte costs about $0.10 for 3.5 inch and $0.20/GB for 2.5 inch drives†.

“You have just increased the costs with a stunning $350″

So what does this mean in reality? For example you want to buy a new Macbook Pro. The cheapest version is a 13″ starting from $1,199.00. Now let’s upgrade it with the smallest 128GB SSD. You have just increased the costs of your new laptop with a stunning $350.00.