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"Spinning drives are actually faster than SSDs for mass media archives"

PeteJames

PeteJames

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 11, 2010
133
0
England
I was surprised to read this in a Gizmodo review and it may potentially change my decision on going with a smaller macbook pro SSD.

Any thoughts/evidence on this matter?
 
PeteJames said:
I was surprised to read this in a Gizmodo review and it may potentially change my decision on going with a smaller macbook pro SSD.

Any thoughts/evidence on this matter?
Click to expand...

Can you give the URL to the story too please?
 
PeteJames said:
I was surprised to read this in a Gizmodo review and it may potentially change my decision on going with a smaller macbook pro SSD.

Any thoughts/evidence on this matter?
Click to expand...

What is your point here?

For Mass Media, it won't make a difference. An MP3 requires very little bandwidth, even a Blu-Ray direct rip requires very little bandwidth to play bck a video. That's why for all Mass Media storage, a mechanical hard drive is still the way to go. I'm All SSD in my house EXCEPT for my Media Server and even that one the boot drive is SSD, but all the media storage is 2TB (or better) Mechanical drives.

But for boot drives, SSD all the way. If for no other reason than when booting you are pulling in 1000's of small files. With a mechanical drive they can take for ever to just be found let alone loaded. An SSD, all files are (virtually) instantly available and have magnitudes faster transfer rates.

However, to actually believe that somehow a Mechanical drive is faster, that's incorrect. Any modern SSD benchmark will prove how much faster data is transferred (max sequential reads of a modern SSD is usually AT LEAST 400MB/s vs 200MB/s for the fastest HD). However, in this case it won't make a difference if the data is on SSD or HD because the bandwidth required is well below what either can pump out.

I stopped reading Gizmodo over a year ago because it became clear they make grandiose statements to get more "clicks".

If the author stated:

And if you're thinking about your massive not-on-Rdio-or-Spotify music collection, or all those torrented movie files that aren't up on Netflix and you can't do without, well, you're just as well off sticking them on a USB 3.0 94007200RPM external hard drive. Why? Spinning drives are just as fast as SSDs for accessing mass media archives.

Then I would say it is completely valid; however, to say Spinning drives are faster is just deplorable.
 
Alright, glad that's cleared up then. Might be better just to get 256 SSD and save my money then. Is there much if any benefit between usb 2.0 and 3.0/thunderbolt then when simply playing back movies and music. I'm guessing not.
 
paulrbeers:

I think you should rephrase your statement that mechanical drives are just as fast as SSDs for accessing media files. That SSDs are superior can be objectively demonstrated.

Is it subjectively equivalent? For the most part it is.
 
Gizmodo (actually, all of Gawker) should never be considered a reputable source for pretty much anything, but especially technical items.
 
pretty much all media these days is well under USB2 speeds.

straight blu-ray rips - 4-6MB/s
iTunes 1080 = 1-2 MB/s

USB2 = 25-30

so plenty of head room, the only time you'll feel the slowness is if you're moving or backing things up.
 
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