I know this has nothing to do with macs but I'm still asking. I have a laptop PC which only supports 5400 rpm HDD that supports sata 2 data. I plan on upgrading it because it is getting slower. Should I get a 7200 rpm HDD or sata 2 SSD? How much faster will a sata 2 SSD will be compared to a 5200 and 7200 rpm HDD? I do not need capacity as this moment and speed and price is my piority.
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Question about HDD and SSD
- Thread starter AdrainSingapore
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5400rpm: around from 65 to 90mb/s (depends on the vendor)
7200rpm: 90-105 mb/s (again depends on the vendor, some manufacturers have 5k4 drives that are faster than some manufacturers 7k2 drives)
Speeds are also inconsistent, the first 1/3 of the drive achieves the "advertised" performance, the last third of the drive approximately HALF that.
That means as they fill up, if you don't have partitions, your system will attempt to write even on 60mb/s areas of 7k2 drives.
SSD: around double what 7k2 offers.
Speeds are consistent across the whole drive.
for HDDs, WD Scorpio series is by far the fastest (blue and black).
SSDs top every HDD in every aspect. Except price/gb ratio.
edit: While we are at it : partitions are not recommended for SSD drives.
7200rpm: 90-105 mb/s (again depends on the vendor, some manufacturers have 5k4 drives that are faster than some manufacturers 7k2 drives)
Speeds are also inconsistent, the first 1/3 of the drive achieves the "advertised" performance, the last third of the drive approximately HALF that.
That means as they fill up, if you don't have partitions, your system will attempt to write even on 60mb/s areas of 7k2 drives.
SSD: around double what 7k2 offers.
Speeds are consistent across the whole drive.
for HDDs, WD Scorpio series is by far the fastest (blue and black).
SSDs top every HDD in every aspect. Except price/gb ratio.
edit: While we are at it : partitions are not recommended for SSD drives.
The SATA II standard has practical max throughput of 270ish MB/s, a SATA III or a good SATA II drive will pretty much saturate that. So, an SSD in your computer will be 2-3x as fast on sustained read/writes, but where it's really going to shine is on random read/writes. Would expect that even a SATA II SSD is going to be orders of magnitude faster than a 7200 rpm drive and the random read/writes are where it counts.
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On Sata3 perhaps, Sata2 not however.
to the op:
be sure to buy a cheaper 3G SSD, because you don't need the 6G one because your sata port doesn't support such speeds.
This fellow's correct, but decent SATA II (3G) drives are actually more expensive than decent SATA III (6G) drives these days. The Crucial V4 has gotten horrible reviews, pretty much leaving just the the OWC Mercury and the Intel 320, both of which are as expensive or more expensive than the many decent SATA III drives available. Unless you own a 2011 cMBP-15 or cMBP-17 a SATA III drive should work just fine in a SATA II slot and could travel with you when you upgrade.
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