Computerworld Showdown: SSDs Fail to Outperform Trusty HDD

April 28th, 2008 at 3:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

The Solid State Drives, known to Apple customers as a very expensive replacement option on the MacBook Air, have no moving parts and are less power hungry. However, when it comes to sheer performance, the SSD was found to be wanting compared to the standard hard disk drive (HDD), according to Computerworld on Tuesday.

The author was able to acquire a Crucial Internal 32 GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD as well as a Ridata unit with the same specifications. He compared them to Seagate Barracuda and Momentus 7200 RPM 3.5 inch SATA drives.

The tests covered speed burst, boot speed, a Vista system restart, cold boot, and an 8 GB copy. The results showed that SSDs were no speed demons when it came to burst speed and the copy process.

"So forgive me for being contrarian, but while I recognize the exotic and alluring nature of solid state disks as a technology -- and have certainly fallen victim to their potential iwow factori on occasion -- after spending 12 days with a pair of them and a pair of mechanical drives, Iim convinced that SSDs have yet to live up to their true potential," the author concluded.

Charts at the end of the article summarize the rather dismal SSD results. The tests demonstarted that while the lower power consumption and shock resistance are SSD strengths, those who want vastly better performance will be disappointed. Thatis not surprising considering the many years of technical development the standard HDD has under its belt. Even so, with futher technical development of SSDs, itis hard too deny that the days of the HDDs are numbered in notebook computers.