Two Questions About HDDs

[Stg-Flame]

Ok, I lied. One question is about SSDs and one about HDDs (but that topic title is too long).

Anyways, I was wondering what a Solid State Drive actually is used for. I've heard they are extremely useful to have, but it seems like they are just a high-end device to run programs which allows you to keep your HDD to serve solely as storage. Am I even close with my reasoning about SSDs?

Secondly, I have always wondered what the difference is between a normal HDD (normal as in the 7,000 RPM range) as opposed to the 10,000 RPM HDDs. I've heard that if you run a game/movie off a 10,000 RPM drive, it will run as fluid as a blu-ray movie on a 1080 HD TV but I cannot find much evidence to support that theory. I compared the video quality off my normal DVD player to my blu-ray player inside my PS3 on my new HD TV and the blu-ray quality makes the movie play as if it's being acted right in front of you - some people say this is the 10,000 RPM effect.

I'm hoping someone can finally clarify these two inquiries for me.

 

[bononos]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2069761 Never heard of the 10k rpm effect.

 

[Jeff7181]

I typed out this whole long post to explain and accidentally closed the browser... in summary...

SSD's are faster because they remove the mechanical latency that comes with having spinning platters and heads that move to read those spinning platters.

HDD spindle speed affects the transfer rate and latency of the drive. If your hard drive's sustained transfer rate does not exceed the bitrate of the movie you're watching, you'll drop frames and/or rebuffer often. With blu-ray, we're talking about around 7 MB/sec. Even the crappiest 2.5 inch 4200 RPM notebook hard drives are capable of that. So upgrading to a Raptor is not going to make your DVD's or DIVX movies look like a movie played from a blu-ray.

Gaming is even less dependent on the spindle speed of the hard drive. Games depend much more on a powerful video card, powerful CPU, and plenty of free RAM.

 

[chucky2]

I'd add that the reason that many people store the data on their traditional mechanical HDD is because those are far more mature than SSD's, so their data is more safe. U can drag your folders over to the HDD or use something like Karen's to copy from the SSD to the HDD.

 

[Jeff7181]

I'd add that the reason that many people store the data on their traditional mechanical HDD is because those are far more mature than SSD's, so their data is more safe. U can drag your folders over to the HDD or use something like Karen's to copy from the SSD to the HDD.

For me, it's not about safety... I see tons of mechanical hard drives fail at work, and they're in a climate controlled data center. Granted, some of them see higher duty cycles, but for the most part, anything that requires a lot of disk activity is on our SAN, so local drives are mostly hold the OS and potentially "scratch" data that's not worth putting on expensive SAN disk.

The reason I would use a hard drive for storage, is that the cost of SSD is still so high, I don't want to use up the space on it to store old pictures that I don't want to delete, but don't look at more than once every few years.

 

[Denithor]

Let me try to start from the beginning.

The spindle speed of traditional (mechanical) HDDs determines how fast the heads in there can find & read a piece of data you want. Higher speed directly produces faster access (lower latency), so a 7,200-rpm drive will be quicker than a 4,200-rpm or 5,400-rpm model (and obviously a 10,000-rpm drive will be even faster). The problem with higher spindle speed is heat, noise and increased power consumption. Therefore typically they use 4,200 or 5,400 rpm drives in laptops to conserve the battery and 7,200 drives in desktops. The 10,000 drives are almost exclusive to enterprise-level applications, with the single exception of the Raptor/Velociraptor series of drives intended for high performance desktops.

Now, the kicker: SSDs take this model and throw it out the window completely. The memory is accessed directly with no moving parts, therefore much lower power and super fast access times. If you look at the link below you'll see relative 4k read/write speeds for a whole series of SSDs versus a couple of mechanical HDDs. Note these are from the previous generation of drives; most reviews today don't even include HDDs for reference because they're so much slower. The drawbacks to SSDs versus HDDs are cost and capacity.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3656/corsairs-force-ssd-reviewed-sf1200-is-very-good/4

And capacity is the main reason people choose to store most data on traditional HDDs.

 

[greenhawk]

I was wondering what a Solid State Drive actually is used for. I've heard they are extremely useful to have, but it seems like they are just a high-end device to run programs which allows you to keep your HDD to serve solely as storage.


Secondly, I have always wondered what the difference is between a normal HDD (normal as in the 7,000 RPM range) as opposed to the 10,000 RPM HDDs. I've heard that if you run a game/movie off a 10,000 RPM drive, it will run as fluid as a blu-ray movie on a 1080 HD TV

On the first point, a SSD is just a HDD. It does all the tasks a normal HDD would do, but faster. Down side is that they cost a lot more than normal HDDs. To balance this high cost, owners generally use both a SSD and a normal HDD and place their files/programs onto the drive that is best suited for the task as they see fit. A gamer might place his games on the SSD and all other programs onto a HDD or a video editor would have his video files on the SSD and everything else on a HDD.

This approach is just to get the best benifit of the expencive SSD.

For the second questions, a 10,000rpm drive is just a faster version of a 7,200 rpm drive. It has some other benifits but the speed is the main point. Before SSDs, the 10,000 drives were the high priced option if you wanted performance (and was used in the same way as SSDs are now).

As to the blu ray example you gave, that is wrong. Running from a 10,000 drive does not help playback enough to be noticable as any current drive is fast enough to read the data and most of the processing needed for displaying the movie is done by other parts of the computer (CPU and GPU).

SSDs and 10,000 rpm drives are only better than a normal HDD when using them for tasks that heavly use a drive. Everything else does not benifit from it.

Some examples of drive tasks that you can notice the difference on include loading games, editing large files, extracting compressed files and virus scanning.

For some people, the speed up is not worth the extra cost, for others, they will pay reasonably well for any improvement just to be faster / save time.

 

[BFG10K]

I've heard that if you run a game/movie off a 10,000 RPM drive, it will run as fluid as a blu-ray movie on a 1080 HD TV but I cannot find much evidence to support that theory.

A blu-ray drive is more than enough to make a 1080p movie smooth, and an optical disc is a lot slower than any HD.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Thanks a lot for all the responses. This clears up my questions.