- May 7, 2013
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The following markedroid/salescritter stupidity that was put out by an SSD manufacturer in their description of their SSD just annoys me on a very deep level:
The upshot of this is that a 4TB hard drive which spins at 5900 RPM will outperform a 7200 RPM 1TB drive in the real world (though perhaps not in synthetic benchmarks). There are three reasons for this:
1) The heads of the 4TB drive will each write (and concomitantly read) more data per track which mitigates the time consuming movement of the heads.
2) A 4TB drive is more likely to be writing to a contiguous area of the drive than a 1TB drive.
3) The overhead of writing to 4KB blocks on the 4TB HD is less than the traditional 512 Bytes of a 1TB drive (although there is slightly more waste due to tails of files using more space):
The other part of the quote "... traditional hard disk drives have not kept pace with evolving market needs." is also monumental BS. There are two "needs" speed and capacity. With regard to hard drives their forte is bulk storage and SSDs just do not fulfil this need. To make matters worse, the write performance of SSDs in a RAID configuration degrades dramatically over time due to the lack of TRIM support.
With regard to storage, hard drives have kept pace with the evolving market needs for space. 4TB of contiguous SSD space can be achieved by putting three 1.6TB drives into a RAID configuration and the price per TB would be £3094.69. A 4 TB enterprise hard drive would cost £83.66 per TB.
So I have to ask myself, "what was the idiot thinking who wrote that trash in the marketing description".
Hard disk drives have not sacrificed performance for capacity. In fact as the capacity has increased so has the performance. There is a limiting factor to a hard drive and that is the fact that it is mechanical and the heads have to move across the platters. However as the capacity has increased, i.e. the density of the data on the platters has increased, the amount of data under the heads reading a particular cylinder has also increased. This means that the heads have to move less (which is the main cause for delay) and thus the reading and writing speed has increased.
The upshot of this is that a 4TB hard drive which spins at 5900 RPM will outperform a 7200 RPM 1TB drive in the real world (though perhaps not in synthetic benchmarks). There are three reasons for this:
1) The heads of the 4TB drive will each write (and concomitantly read) more data per track which mitigates the time consuming movement of the heads.
2) A 4TB drive is more likely to be writing to a contiguous area of the drive than a 1TB drive.
3) The overhead of writing to 4KB blocks on the 4TB HD is less than the traditional 512 Bytes of a 1TB drive (although there is slightly more waste due to tails of files using more space):
The other part of the quote "... traditional hard disk drives have not kept pace with evolving market needs." is also monumental BS. There are two "needs" speed and capacity. With regard to hard drives their forte is bulk storage and SSDs just do not fulfil this need. To make matters worse, the write performance of SSDs in a RAID configuration degrades dramatically over time due to the lack of TRIM support.
With regard to storage, hard drives have kept pace with the evolving market needs for space. 4TB of contiguous SSD space can be achieved by putting three 1.6TB drives into a RAID configuration and the price per TB would be £3094.69. A 4 TB enterprise hard drive would cost £83.66 per TB.
So I have to ask myself, "what was the idiot thinking who wrote that trash in the marketing description".
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