OK I have a question why does the SSD make the computer faster.Yes I understand that the SSD has no moving parts but how/why does that affect the performance?
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Why does the SSD make the computer faster
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What is an SSD?
It is faster, as there are no platters to spin and no head to move to find the correct data. It is like a very, very, very fast USB flash memory thumb drive or very, very, very slow RAM.
It is faster, as there are no platters to spin and no head to move to find the correct data. It is like a very, very, very fast USB flash memory thumb drive or very, very, very slow RAM.
This.
I often wonder why newcomers believe this forum is the only resource for all things technical.
Google will show you various discussions and papers discussing any given topic, don't limit yourself to the wisdom of the members of this forum.
I ask here because I know that if i don't understand something about an SSD and ask google it is not gonna be as personal and if i can't get my head around a certain prospect then i can ask THAT specific question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
That article is written for almost any audience, you don't even need to have a solid computer background to understand it.
I'm glad to help whenever I can, but all I'm saying is, google will offer you much more information than anyone on here can.
To make a short story, I'll spoon feed it to you:
Platter hard drives top out at about 70-80MB/s in read/write speeds, quick SSD's can reach upwards of 500MB/S in read/write.
Launching an application essentially reads it off the of hard drive, and puts it into the RAM. When the transfer from the hard drive(be it platter or SSD) is faster, so is the application launch. Simple as that.
Thankyou for a straight forward answer this was what i was asking for.
also thanks to the guy two above this post.
The benchmarks that I've seen for MacbookPro say that its not a huge difference having a SSD drive in a Mac. You see better results in PC laptops.
I rather just use a faster external drive. #mytwocents
But the SSD makes applications launch quicker and boot time is faster?
The big reason is this: no moving parts.
This means that instead of there being a few milliseconds every time the hard drive has to move the read head to a different part of the disk to access a different file or part of the same file - there's no seek time.
Sequential read/write speed on SSD is good, but the real win is zero seek time.
e.g.: the sequential IO speed for a good hard drive is perhaps 120 megabytes per second. For an SSD 250-500 megabytes per second is typical
RANDOM io, however is where the SSD sees a massive win.
Random IO for a hard drive may be only 1 megabyte per second. For an SSD this won't be too far off its sequential read speed...
This means that instead of there being a few milliseconds every time the hard drive has to move the read head to a different part of the disk to access a different file or part of the same file - there's no seek time.
Sequential read/write speed on SSD is good, but the real win is zero seek time.
e.g.: the sequential IO speed for a good hard drive is perhaps 120 megabytes per second. For an SSD 250-500 megabytes per second is typical
RANDOM io, however is where the SSD sees a massive win.
Random IO for a hard drive may be only 1 megabyte per second. For an SSD this won't be too far off its sequential read speed...
This is why your own research might have been a better choice.
As an answer as to WHY SSDs make a notebook so much faster snaky69's answer as well as about 3 more here completely miss the point.
The big difference is latency and random read speeds. The former more than the latter.throAU said:
latency 0.5ms SSD vs 16+ms HDD
random read 25-60MB/s SSD vs 0.5-1.2MB/s HDD.
This is the difference that makes everything seem so much faster. The sequential read speeds be it now 100, 200 oder 500 MB/s makes actually are very small difference, for launching applications and such.
Any SSD even one that has sequential read speeds no faster than a hdd halfs application load times at least. A 500MB/s Samsung 830 of the newest crop doesn't really change the application launch times in a very significant way.
old ssds some facing up against a velociraptor a 10k rpm hdd that is much faster than any notebook hdd. 7-8ms latency vs. the more common 16-20ms in notebooks.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/laufwerke/2010/test-ocz-vertex-2/7/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
here ist the newest crop of SSDs
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...erie-830-256-gb/7/#abschnitt_anwendungsstarts
After a huge jump from the HDD to any SSD there is very little gained in all these tests from going to the fastest ssd. The tests are not completely the same but for the most part the methodology is equal enough to see the picture.
Or look at boot times almost no difference at all after a huge leap from the hdds (and those are fast hdds)
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/laufwerke/2010/test-ocz-vertex-2/6/#abschnitt_bootzeiten
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...sung-serie-830-256-gb/6/#abschnitt_bootzeiten
latency is almost the same on the new and old ssds. Sequential read/write helps in other situations but what makes a notebook with an SSD feel so much faster than a the same notebook with an hdd has almost nothing to do with maximum read/write speeds.
gotcha. just seems too much money to spend on seconds of an app opening. I think I'm gonna do a test... my Quicksilver vs my MBP just to see the speeds of my App opening on both. The Apps are similar but I would be comparing 733mhz vs 2.4Ghz
gotcha. just seems too much money to spend on seconds of an app opening. I think I'm gonna do a test... my Quicksilver vs my MBP just to see the speeds of my App opening on both. The Apps are similar but I would be comparing 733mhz vs 2.4Ghz
Wow no compitetion lol the 2.4 would sexually violate the 700mhz,for a lack of something more descriptive to say
gotcha. just seems too much money to spend on seconds of an app opening. I think I'm gonna do a test... my Quicksilver vs my MBP just to see the speeds of my App opening on both. The Apps are similar but I would be comparing 733mhz vs 2.4Ghz
The CPU (speed) has hardly anything to do with launching applications, it is the medium they are stored on, that has to do the heavy lifting.
Check Activity Monitor and see for yourself.
Wow no compitetion lol the 2.4 would sexually violate the 700mhz,for a lack of something more descriptive to say
Nah it's all pinned on the hard drive speed. If there was an SSD in the Quicksilver and a 5200RPM platter drive in the MacBook Pro the Quicksilver would be doing the 'sexual violation'
in a very simple sense, a hard drive reads magnetic data from a spinning disk. The data can only be so dense and the disk can only spin so fast. Also, the outside of the hard drive spinning "disk" has higher densities than the inside of the disk (picture a cd and it makes sense).
in a very simple sense, an ssd is designed more like a cpu. It has no moving parts and bits are stored as voltages. Therefore, it is not bound by those same physical limitations and has the capability to be faster. Also, any data on the drive can be read at the same relative speed.
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Nah it's all pinned on the hard drive speed. If there was an SSD in the Quicksilver and a 5200RPM platter drive in the MacBook Pro the Quicksilver would be doing the 'sexual violation'
Really? I thought they support 1.5 GBit/s SATA, not 3.0 or 6.0 GBit/s SATA connections via PCI expansion cards!? The standard connection is via PATA (UDMA-66).
Btw, i know that 3.0 GBit/s SATA cards exist for the G4s, but i doubt the PCI-bus is fast enough + most 3.0 GBit/s cards for these models do not support bootable disks.
The benchmarks that I've seen for MacbookPro say that its not a huge difference having a SSD drive in a Mac. You see better results in PC laptops.
I rather just use a faster external drive. #mytwocents
Benchmarks are nice, but have you ever experienced the difference? I had a 500 GB Hybrid Drive in my MBP and cold boot took about 50 seconds. Now with a 128 GB it takes less than 15. And apps start way faster. I put the 500 GB as a replacement for the DVD drive and think about swapping it all again to have a 256 GB SSD as boot drive and the 128 GB SSD for VMware virtual machines.
No. The density is the same. The outside contains more blocks (sectors) but also on a much larger surface, so the density stays the same. You mean another effect.
No. Before the SSD-controller writes data to the flash storage, he must erase the appropriate data blocks, which means that the REAL SSD write speeds are always lower than the read speeds. Some SSD-benchmarks do not show the real difference between the read and write speeds, because they do use non-random data, which the SSD-controller can compress. Newer versions of the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test use random data, which is incompressible, and show the real write speed of your SSD.
From:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12
Blackmagic Design Inc. said:
Btw, uncompressed video looks like random data (in HexEdit for example), because it contains usually the complex details (from a HD-camera).