Storage Wars: SSD vs HDD Part 3
Unlocking Workstation Productivity Potential
For anyone following along, this article presents the 3rdand final installment of the Storage Wars series where the goal has been to objectively compare the user experience when upgrading toa Solid Disk Drive (SSD) in place of legacy Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) as the primary storage device in new desktop PCs. We started with general-purpose business-class PCs and then moved on to the budget PC segment. For the final round of testing, we focused on professional-grade workstations to complete our understanding of SSD value in all product tiers. Based upon testing in the3aforementioneddesktop PC product segments, the following conclusions can be made:
- SSDs are more expensive than HDDs in terms of dollars spent per capacity of storage ($/GB),but the prices of SSDs are continuously improving with the trends suggesting that they will eventually drop below that of HDDs.
- SSDs provide incredible performance and reliability benefits over HDDs which, in most cases, far exceeds the relative price increase of the SSD.
- “Hybrid” storage solutions that pair a low-capacity SSD with a higher-capacity HDD can increase system performance by 89% while only increasing system cost by 8-11% for budget-conscious consumers.
- Upgrading a new workstation PC to SSD technology can improve application responsiveness by over 250%and decrease time spent waiting for large files to load by over 97%making it more and not less imperative to upgrade to an SSD for professional-grade PCs.
If you are interested ina fascinating readabout the testing that lead to the arrival of conclusions 1 through 3 above, check out Part 1 and Part 2 from our Storage Wars series. If you read conclusion number 4 above and find yourself thinking:
“If I upgrade to a more expensive (higher performance) CPU and/or GPU, is it really necessary to spend the extra money for an SSD?” then please keep reading!
