In a related post about "
Which external hard drives for a Mac?", the topic shifted to the merits of solid states drives, and how they compare to hard drives.
Or SSD vs HDD.
While running a Google check on the topic, I came across a review that had some very misleading comments. Specifically, this comment:
Quote:
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if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost
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To copy/paste my text from the other thread:
When you're using "multiple applications", some of them tend to be idle in RAM. For example, I have Outlook open, and it's doing nothing, minimized. There's several system tray programs running in RAM, but I/O performance is zero or near-zero. If you were running several programs at once, and both of them needed heavy-handed I/O, then by all likelihood both tasks would be fighting over RAM space and CPU time. So again, the bottleneck ends up NOT being the drive!
Unless you're Sally the soccer mom, your computer generally has more than one hard drive -- especially those cheap USB2 externals. So when you're downloading files to drive D, drive C is not affected by I/O. And if drive D is an external USB drive, you're pulling at the CPU because USB drives all run through CPU cycles. Firewire and eSATA, of course, do not access via CPU.
Quotes like that are misleading at best, lies at worst.
But that's not all!
When you look at the flimsy "review" comparing the two technologies, pay close attention to the fact that the person didn't actually use the computers -- he crammed the hardware through benchmark tests, which are well-known in the IT community to be misleading and commonly do not represent real-world usage.
Benchmarking software is largely written by, and for the benefit of, manufacturers of hardware. Bias? Of course -- they're looking to hawk their new wares. And if you don't know any better, those benchmarks always look impressive, and almost always show something new to be so much better than what you already have. Please don't buy into that fallacy. It's hogwash.
Final note: As per our guidelines here at The Digital FAQ, we don't link to myths/crap. But for the curious, this was the SSD vs HDD review:
Review: Hard disk vs. solid-state drive -- is an SSD worth the money? (June 2009)
Code:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9134468/Review_Hard_disk_vs._solid_state_drive_is_an_SSD_worth_the_money
I felt the need to address SSD.
While it's definitely a good tech, and will long-term replace magnetic spinning drives, it's for more "green" reasons -- lower power, less heat, quieter, lighter weight, etc. If they can overcome the limited-writes issues, it will be an improvement the lifespans of storage, too, as hard drives mostly die from mechanical failures (and SSD has no mechanical moving parts). And finally, prices must fall to encourage adoption.
Don't get caught up in the idea that it's faster or will make your computer run better. Those are misdirects.
Note: Some actual
benefits of SSD drives are listed in that other thread:
Which external drive for mac ?
