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IDC being coy about SSD-HDD comparison

posted on 17 July 2008 12:17

Buy IDC study for $10,000 or go to The Tech Report for nothing

Both IDC and The Tech Report have compared hard disk drive and solid state drive performance and found SSDs are not the runaway success they appear to be. You'll shell out $10,000 to find wout what IDC found out and $0.00 to find out The Tech Report's results though.

Save yourself a click and read on.

IDC has used a third-party testing lab to compare HDD and SSD speeds. They specified that 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDS be used so as not to test HDD tortoises against SSD hares. What did they find?

Dave Reinsel, IDC's group VP for Storage and Semiconductors, says in the report abstract: "The results were both predictable and unexpected, but in the end, our results have led us to several significant conclusions that we believe will be eye-opening for those that have anything to do with storage device technologies in PCs."

Finding out these eye-opening conclusions will cost you $10,000 as you have to buy the IDC report 'Benchmarking Storage Options for PCs: The Results Are In — Exposing the Strengths and Weaknesses of HDDs, SSDs, and Hybrids' which you can do here.

The Tech Report also tested SSDs and HDDs and the results they found were not expected and not predictable but also eye-opening. The testers there compared both 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives against the SSDs. Specifically they looked at the single level cell (SLC) OCZ SATA II ($979) and Samsung Flash SSD 64GB ($799) models which both had a maximum sequential 100MB/sec read speed and 80MB/sec write speed and a 0.1msec access time.

They also included the 2bit multi-level cell (MLC) Super Talent MasterDrive MX (60GB, $365) with read speed of 120MB/sec but write speed of a dismal 40MB/sec. Super Talent says a firmware upgrade will double that to 80MB/sec; it wasn't available for testing.

Hybrid hard drives were tested by the IDC testers but not by The Tech Report.

The HDD population included Seagate Momentus 2.5-inch 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm drives and Western Digital Scorpio Blue and Black drives. The speed tests included various activities: system bootstrap, MS Office, PhotoShop, video editing and so forth. In general the SSDs excelled at read-intensive work but not by as much as you might expect. In write-intensive applications and mixed applications their speed advantage was not marked and sometimes absent. The Super Talent SSD was, in virtually all cases, markedly slower than the other two SSDs and also slower than some of the HDDs.

Disk-intensive video editing type work showed off the SSDs to best effect. Mixed workloads with random reads demonstrated a lack of SSD superiority in any meaningful sense at all, MS Office for example. System boot time was speeded up by SSDs but not by as much as we might have hoped.

The Super Talent SSD-equipped notebook was the slowest of all SSD notebooks and often slower than the HDD notebooks; a both unexpected and eye-opening finding.

The Tech Report article is thorough and comprehensive and well worth going through its ten or so web pages. A subset of the articles are displayed below. Download full size versions of this subset in the PDF below these.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}

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