The Science Behind Hard Drive Performance: Understanding SSDs and Traditional Hard Drives

In modern computers, hard drives play a crucial role in storing data. However, traditional hard drives face significant limitations when it comes to accessing data. Unlike our brains, which store information in a linear fashion, data is stored on a hard drive in a more scattered manner. This can lead to slower performance as the hard drive has to rotate and realign itself to read data.

The problem with traditional hard drives is that they are not designed for fast access times. Imagine trying to find a specific book in a vast library - it's not exactly efficient, right? With traditional hard drives, the head has to constantly align itself to read data, which can lead to slow performance. In fact, some hard drives may only reach speeds of 2 MB per second.

On the other hand, Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are designed for fast access times and high performance. SSDs think of themselves as memory chips that store data on flash memory. Unlike traditional hard drives, which can lose data when power is switched off, SSDs retain their data even when the power is turned off. This makes them ideal for applications where speed is crucial.

One key benefit of SSDs is their access time, which is significantly faster than traditional hard drives. While traditional hard drives may take around 15 milliseconds to access data, SSDs can do it in a mere 2 milliseconds. This means that SSDs can handle sequential data access with ease, whereas traditional hard drives struggle.

In terms of raw storage performance, traditional hard drives still win out. However, when speed is the primary concern, SSDs are the clear winner. To take advantage of this, many users opt for a low-capacity SSD as their primary drive and attach a traditional hard drive for larger files like videos, movies, and music.

In recent years, Kingston Technologies has been at the forefront of developing high-performance SSDs. The company recently sent us two of their latest drives - one SATA 2 model and another SATA 3 model. We will be conducting extensive benchmarking to compare these drives with traditional hard drives in our next series of videos.

Practical Benefits of Using an SSD

So, what are the practical benefits of using an SSD? For example, let's say you're loading up your computer for the day. With a fast SSD, you can expect much faster boot times. In fact, we've seen some SSDs load in as little as 20 seconds, whereas traditional hard drives may take around 50 seconds to boot.

Another significant advantage of SSDs is their ability to handle large programs and files quickly. For instance, loading up Photoshop or similar applications on an SSD can be significantly faster than using a traditional hard drive. We've seen some SSDs load large programs in as little as 3 seconds, whereas traditional hard drives may take around 10-15 seconds.

Our own experience with the Kingston SSD is telling. When compared to our i7 desktop, which has a traditional hard drive, we often find that the MacBook Air feels faster due to its built-in SSD. While the MacBook Air's processor may be outdated, its SSD makes up for it in terms of speed and responsiveness.

However, there is one major drawback to using SSDs: cost. Kingston's 96GB SSD costs around $150, which is significantly more than a traditional hard drive with similar storage capacity.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the science behind hard drive performance is fascinating. While traditional hard drives have their advantages in terms of raw storage capacity, SSDs offer significantly faster access times and better overall performance. To take advantage of this, users can opt for low-capacity SSDs as their primary drive and attach traditional hard drives for larger files. With the latest advancements from Kingston Technologies, we're excited to explore the capabilities of these high-performance SSDs in our next series of videos.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi there this is ranit from tech.com and in this video I'm going to talk about SST and why it makes sense to upgrade to a SSD drive uh let me give you an example uh most of the users generally upgrade their computer every 2 or 3 years basically they upgrade the processor but one thing that doesn't change is the storage basically they use the traditional storage that's the hard drive this is a traditional hard drive and the problem with this is that though the capacities of our hard drives have increased a lot we used to just get about 100 GB a couple of years ago now we can get 3 terabytes of uh hard drive the speed at which you can access this data hasn't improved a lot and SSD come into the picture the problem with the traditional hard drive is that our processors have become really fast but as our hard drives are not able to send that data to our processor everything slows down and it becomes a bottleneck so let me give an example with actual bottle so here we have one bottle and think that the data is going to pass through this and this is our processor uh as you can see this part is wide and this part is narrow and our hard drive is over here let's say our processor it's a latest processor that's an i7 or whatever can process 500 units of data per second but as you might have been noticed our hard drive is here actually our hard drive is is not capable of transferring 500 units of data so uh it might be just sending about 100 units of data per second to our processor so as you can see though our processor is really powerful but it's being slowed down because of a hard drive now taking the same example of the bottle now we have a new bottle what we have done is we have changed the hard drive and now we have an SSD and this is our processor as you notice with an SST the path is really wide so it can transfer a lot more data faster than a traditional hard drive so generally a SSD drive is much faster than a traditional hard drive but to explain why let me give you a quick overview how a hard drive Works basically a hard drive basically it's a mechanical device basically what uh just imagine a circular disc like a cdrom or something like that uh that's basically on the hard drive these are known as basically platters and your data is basically stored on them and to access that data basically your hard drive has a motor inside it and this whole spindle basically rotates really fast the 5,200 RPM the 7,200 RPM is this basically the speed at which the splitter can basically rotate and we also have a head over that which actually when this platter is rotating it reads the data so as you can imagine to access the data the hard drive has to rotate a lot and basically the head again has to move up and down to access the data and all this basically takes time it's in milliseconds but with a large amount of data it can basically add up there's one more basic problem with the hard drive is that generally the hard drives are really fast if the data is basically sequential for example uh let's say we have 50 uh megabytes of data that we have and as I have told this data is basically stored in a circular platter let's say this 50 mb of data is in a straight line that's basically just like this like a smiley face it's connected so the hard drive can read this data really quickly generally modern hard drives can read basically anywhere from about 80 MB to 100 MB but this 80 and 100 MB of speed is only if the data is basically in a straight line like this sorry circular but generally in computers the data is not stored like that it's basically scattered everywhere on the desk and this is where hard drives basically have a huge problem because imagine let's say this is our hard drive and the data is one one uh bit of the data is stored here one bit over here one bit over here one bit over here the hard drive has to rotate a lot and the head has to constantly align itself to read the data so basically uh with the random data your hard drive performance goes really low it can go down to as low as about 2 mb/ second on the other hand these problems are not faced by the SSD uh basically SSD think of SSD as nothing but a uh basically it's a drive on which the data is stored on memory chips uh do not mistake it with your Ram with your RAM if your computer is Switched Off the data gets lost but on a SSD basically this is not the case it is flash memory so even when the power is Switched Off the data is over there and as you know with memory the access time is really uh low so it doesn't matter if the data is scattered everywhere then also the access time is really fast for for example example on a typical hard drive the access time is about 15 milliseconds and compared that to SSD that's 2 milliseconds so ssds are really fast and again even in the sequential uh data access that's where data is aligned properly a traditional hard drive can get about 80 to uh 100 mb per second transfer rate whereas a fast SSD can touch around 500 MB of data so you might be ask asking what are the practical benefits of using an SSD and what difference will it make in my real life for example let's say your Windows computer generally now takes about 50 seconds to boot with a fast SSD like this it can come down the boot time can come down to about 20 seconds again one more thing is that uh where SSD is really advantages that let's say you have this big huge program let's say for example Photoshop or something like that with a traditional hard drive it might might take about 10 or 15 seconds to load with a fast SSD that can come down to about 3 seconds so generally uh loading uh big programs and moving around with files will be lot faster and your thus your computer will feel a lot faster for example I have a MacBook Air which has a built-in SSD and if you compare my i7 desktop to that I at times feel that my MacBook Air is much faster in booting and accessing files though the MacBook Air has a very outdated processor that's a code too at just 1.8 GHz it beats my i7 uh desktop at times it's just because of SST but everything is not rosy with ssds the problem with the ssds is that it's the price for example uh I have this Kingston SSD this is a 96 GB SSD and this is going to cost approximately about $150 and compare that to a hard drive you can get basically I don't know about 3 tab or 2 terabyte of hard drive so when it comes to Raw storage performance a traditional hard drive wins over SSD but when speed of access is required SSD is way faster so what I suggest is that to take advantage of SSD basically you can go with a low capacity SSD like a 60 or a 96 GB SSD like that and load and make it your primary C drive where you load your operating system and all your basically programs and files and you also attach a traditional hard drive and basically you should store all your data like uh videos movies uh music etc those are large files on the traditional hard drive that way you can take the advantage of the speed of the SSD and basically you can take the advantage of a standard hard drive for storage now you might be saying that all this theory is uh great but where are the actual performance results basically Kingston technologies have been really helpful and they have sent us basically two SSD drives this is a SATA 2 drive and this is a sata 3 drive basically what I'm going to do is in the next coming weeks I'll be doing a lot of benchmarking and compare these drives with the traditional hard drives so subscribe to my channel for more info that's it for now this is an for Te tbs.com and hopefully I'm going to see you in my next videohi there this is ranit from tech.com and in this video I'm going to talk about SST and why it makes sense to upgrade to a SSD drive uh let me give you an example uh most of the users generally upgrade their computer every 2 or 3 years basically they upgrade the processor but one thing that doesn't change is the storage basically they use the traditional storage that's the hard drive this is a traditional hard drive and the problem with this is that though the capacities of our hard drives have increased a lot we used to just get about 100 GB a couple of years ago now we can get 3 terabytes of uh hard drive the speed at which you can access this data hasn't improved a lot and SSD come into the picture the problem with the traditional hard drive is that our processors have become really fast but as our hard drives are not able to send that data to our processor everything slows down and it becomes a bottleneck so let me give an example with actual bottle so here we have one bottle and think that the data is going to pass through this and this is our processor uh as you can see this part is wide and this part is narrow and our hard drive is over here let's say our processor it's a latest processor that's an i7 or whatever can process 500 units of data per second but as you might have been noticed our hard drive is here actually our hard drive is is not capable of transferring 500 units of data so uh it might be just sending about 100 units of data per second to our processor so as you can see though our processor is really powerful but it's being slowed down because of a hard drive now taking the same example of the bottle now we have a new bottle what we have done is we have changed the hard drive and now we have an SSD and this is our processor as you notice with an SST the path is really wide so it can transfer a lot more data faster than a traditional hard drive so generally a SSD drive is much faster than a traditional hard drive but to explain why let me give you a quick overview how a hard drive Works basically a hard drive basically it's a mechanical device basically what uh just imagine a circular disc like a cdrom or something like that uh that's basically on the hard drive these are known as basically platters and your data is basically stored on them and to access that data basically your hard drive has a motor inside it and this whole spindle basically rotates really fast the 5,200 RPM the 7,200 RPM is this basically the speed at which the splitter can basically rotate and we also have a head over that which actually when this platter is rotating it reads the data so as you can imagine to access the data the hard drive has to rotate a lot and basically the head again has to move up and down to access the data and all this basically takes time it's in milliseconds but with a large amount of data it can basically add up there's one more basic problem with the hard drive is that generally the hard drives are really fast if the data is basically sequential for example uh let's say we have 50 uh megabytes of data that we have and as I have told this data is basically stored in a circular platter let's say this 50 mb of data is in a straight line that's basically just like this like a smiley face it's connected so the hard drive can read this data really quickly generally modern hard drives can read basically anywhere from about 80 MB to 100 MB but this 80 and 100 MB of speed is only if the data is basically in a straight line like this sorry circular but generally in computers the data is not stored like that it's basically scattered everywhere on the desk and this is where hard drives basically have a huge problem because imagine let's say this is our hard drive and the data is one one uh bit of the data is stored here one bit over here one bit over here one bit over here the hard drive has to rotate a lot and the head has to constantly align itself to read the data so basically uh with the random data your hard drive performance goes really low it can go down to as low as about 2 mb/ second on the other hand these problems are not faced by the SSD uh basically SSD think of SSD as nothing but a uh basically it's a drive on which the data is stored on memory chips uh do not mistake it with your Ram with your RAM if your computer is Switched Off the data gets lost but on a SSD basically this is not the case it is flash memory so even when the power is Switched Off the data is over there and as you know with memory the access time is really uh low so it doesn't matter if the data is scattered everywhere then also the access time is really fast for for example example on a typical hard drive the access time is about 15 milliseconds and compared that to SSD that's 2 milliseconds so ssds are really fast and again even in the sequential uh data access that's where data is aligned properly a traditional hard drive can get about 80 to uh 100 mb per second transfer rate whereas a fast SSD can touch around 500 MB of data so you might be ask asking what are the practical benefits of using an SSD and what difference will it make in my real life for example let's say your Windows computer generally now takes about 50 seconds to boot with a fast SSD like this it can come down the boot time can come down to about 20 seconds again one more thing is that uh where SSD is really advantages that let's say you have this big huge program let's say for example Photoshop or something like that with a traditional hard drive it might might take about 10 or 15 seconds to load with a fast SSD that can come down to about 3 seconds so generally uh loading uh big programs and moving around with files will be lot faster and your thus your computer will feel a lot faster for example I have a MacBook Air which has a built-in SSD and if you compare my i7 desktop to that I at times feel that my MacBook Air is much faster in booting and accessing files though the MacBook Air has a very outdated processor that's a code too at just 1.8 GHz it beats my i7 uh desktop at times it's just because of SST but everything is not rosy with ssds the problem with the ssds is that it's the price for example uh I have this Kingston SSD this is a 96 GB SSD and this is going to cost approximately about $150 and compare that to a hard drive you can get basically I don't know about 3 tab or 2 terabyte of hard drive so when it comes to Raw storage performance a traditional hard drive wins over SSD but when speed of access is required SSD is way faster so what I suggest is that to take advantage of SSD basically you can go with a low capacity SSD like a 60 or a 96 GB SSD like that and load and make it your primary C drive where you load your operating system and all your basically programs and files and you also attach a traditional hard drive and basically you should store all your data like uh videos movies uh music etc those are large files on the traditional hard drive that way you can take the advantage of the speed of the SSD and basically you can take the advantage of a standard hard drive for storage now you might be saying that all this theory is uh great but where are the actual performance results basically Kingston technologies have been really helpful and they have sent us basically two SSD drives this is a SATA 2 drive and this is a sata 3 drive basically what I'm going to do is in the next coming weeks I'll be doing a lot of benchmarking and compare these drives with the traditional hard drives so subscribe to my channel for more info that's it for now this is an for Te tbs.com and hopefully I'm going to see you in my next video\n"