Velociraptor Hard Drives against SSD

[PotatoRynn]

So this is just a discussion, not me asking for help or anything like that. And also forgive me if this was already a thing on a different post. I have two velociraptor drives. I've been told so many times by countless people to upgrade to SSDs since they're faster. My question is how much faster? Would I really notice a difference, because it doesn't take long for my computer to boot at all. Aside from prices for each thing, what are the actual reasons why an SSD is better than a Velociraptor drive?

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, PotatoRynn said:

So this is just a discussion, not me asking for help or anything like that. And also forgive me if this was already a thing on a different post. I have two velociraptor drives. I've been told so many times by countless people to upgrade to SSDs since they're faster. My question is how much faster? Would I really notice a difference, because it doesn't take long for my computer to boot at all. Aside from prices for each thing, what are the actual reasons why an SSD is better than a Velociraptor drive?

Throughput. It's simple physics. SSD drives are orders of magnitude faster because there are (effectively) no moving parts.

I went from a 'raptor drive in a system, with a "power-on" to Windows boot time of about 30 seconds. 

I switched to a SSD, cloned my drive (so all identical) and dropped boot time to 10 seconds. The difference was palpable.

 

[WereCat]

Even the worst SATA SSD will be significantly faster than even the fastest HDD. 

Just get it, it is worth it. OS, programs,... Everything will load so much faster. 

SSDs are very cheap at the moment as well. 

 

Its not about boot speed. Everything that is on the SSD will open almost instantly.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Assuming we're talking about 1TB 2.5" looking drive, the best case performance I've been able to find is the drive can do about 250 MB/sec and 14,000 IOPS. A SATA SSD can do 550 MB/sec and 100K IOPS easily.

 

Practical performance for drives however tends to lean more towards IOPS than bandwidth, since not every request is asking for dozens or hundreds of megabytes of data at once. So I would imagine that even with an HDD like a Velociraptor, you're looking at the same perceived performance boost going to an SSD than with any other HDD.

[Jurrunio]

Latency: one spins a disk, one moves electrons.

 

The most difference comes from going through data scattered (fragmented) all over the place. The HDD needs to move the needle multiple times, while the SSD doesnt really care.

 

[Zando_]

Apparently it can handle up to 205MB/s reads/writes, whereas my WD Black NVMe can handle over 3GB/s so it's a far sight faster. Even my basic HyperX SSD does 176MB/s. SSDs are also totally silent and use less power, but in a PC tower I doubt that's a massive concern. They are a heck of a lot more compact though (M.2 drives especially), and in the case of NVMe ones much, much faster. I haven't tried running a bench on the 860 Evo in a rig I'm flipping but I'd assume it'd beat those HDDs or at least match them, and it was recently on sale for $55 for a 250GB. A 1TB one is $166 and apparently can handle 500MB/s writes and 304MB/s total storage bandwidth when you average the score, going off Tom's Hardware's review of it. 

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Throughput. It's simple physics. SSD drives are orders of magnitude faster because there are (effectively) no moving parts.

I went from a 'raptor drive in a system, with a "power-on" to Windows boot time of about 30 seconds. 

I switched to a SSD, cloned my drive (so all identical) and dropped boot time to 10 seconds. The difference was palpable.

 

Facts, the 860 Evo I put in the rig I'm selling is nuts (as is the NVMe one in my main rig), after the BIOS screen it boots in 3-5 seconds, 10 at most. Insanely fast. 

[knightslugger]

4 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Facts, the 860 Evo I put in the rig I'm selling is nuts (as is the NVMe one in my main rig), after the BIOS screen it boots in 3-5 seconds, 10 at most. Insanely fast. 

i get about one and a quarter full animation of the orbiting windows dots, then I am at my desktop. I have found this to be true with the following SSDs:

 

Plextor M8 - NVMe

Crucial MX500 - SATA

[SSD Sean]

Get a SSD period. Latency is 15-50 times lower and QD1 small file size performance eats HDDs for breakfast, which matters most for OS and application use.

[Zando_]

8 minutes ago, SeanSSD said:

Get a SSD period. Latency is 15-50 times lower and QD1 small file size performance eats HDDs for breakfast, which matters most for OS and application use.

Not to mention like I said in my post, a 1TB 860 Evo is actually cheaper than the Velociraptor drives, I was seeing them for around $190 or so when the 860 Evo is $166 for the 2.5" SATA one. 

[PotatoRynn]

Oh geez

 

Ok, so now that the questions answered, I'll try to swap to an SSD asap, considering I bought a drive cloner recently to save data from a failing hard drive. Since I'm a cheapo boyo, with amazon prime, would this be a good SSD to grab? (Note that I need 500GB+ to use my cloning thing)

https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Performance-Internal-SP512GBSS3A55S25/dp/B07997QV4Z/ref=sr_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1539663626&sr=1-6&keywords=500GB+SSD&dpID=51wTtyJ1zsL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

[SSD Sean]

I would HIGHLY recommend the Samsung 860 EVO, WD Blue 3D/SanDisk Ultra 3D, or Crucial MX500 over that drive for the extra ~$15. Much better performance, endurance, warranty, and quality. Other than that, if you can fit an M.2 NVMe SSD into your budget/system the ADATA SX8200 is a great buy right now, but still rather pricey compared to these SATA based drives at $110.

[PotatoRynn]

Another question. Even though I have a cloning thing for drives, wouldn't I have to get a new key for windows after transferring everything from the OS hard drive to the SSD? (Hypothetically, lets say I didn't buy a key from microsoft but instead from a different seller, cough cough.) Pretty sure that, if it works the same way for hard drives at least, even if you had an OS on one hard drive, it wouldn't magically work on a different computer. (As in that OS wouldn't work on a different computer until reinstalling it.)

[SSD Sean]

Windows activation keys have typically tied themselves to the motherboard. Even if you were to change motherboards, you can just reactivate Windows on a new board without a hitch most of the time. Cloning the OS does not usually mess with Windows activation.