**Comparing Old PC with SSD vs New PC with Hard Drive: A Detailed Analysis**

In this video, we compare the performance of an old PC with a solid-state drive (SSD) to a brand new gaming system with a hard drive. The goal is to see how much of a difference the older hard drive makes to the day-to-day usability of the newer system.

**Initial Boot Times and Responsiveness**

When booting up both systems, it takes quite a long time for the new system to become usable and actually responsive to inputs. However, once settled into the login process, basic tasks like launching the start bar and right-clicking on the desktop are about comparable in speed between the two systems.

**Game Download Times**

To test the performance of both systems, we downloaded games on Steam onto their respective boot drives. Interestingly, we saw different metrics for the downloads, indicating how they interacted with the hard drives. This brings us to one of the most important tests: how quickly do games actually load on the two systems?

**Game Loading Times**

For this first test, the older system won by a significant margin, loading into the map in a much faster time than the new system. However, if we quit the map and then loaded back into it on the new system with the hard drive, it was way faster than the older PC.

**Crystal Disk Mark Results**

The final objective test performed between the two systems was Crystal Disk Mark. As expected, the Samsung hard drive is very slow, but another interesting thing to note is that the SATA 2 interface does actually hold back the SSD a bit. Although 300 megabits per second is still pretty good for snappy Windows response and way faster than the 30 megabits per second of the older hard drive.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, how much of a difference does an old hard drive make to the day-to-day usability of a brand new Beast gaming system? Aside from boot times being quite slow, it's not that bad once you've got everything launched in Google Chrome. It's snappy enough, and you don't feel much of a difference between using an SSD-based boot drive and this terrible hard drive.

**Day-to-Day Usability of Older System with SSD**

The same goes for game load times - once the games loaded once, it's not that bad. And when it comes to actual gaming performance, obviously it sucks because while the CPU is a huge bottleneck there. But when it comes to browsing on the Internet and stuff, the PC is very much usable.

**Would I Prefer Old PC with SSD or New PC with Hard Drive?**

If I did anything other than just browsing the Internet, I may actually go with the older system with the SSD in it. But for any other use case, yeah, obviously the new system is way better. Things take longer to use in the system, and it's a bit more frustrating.

**Final Thoughts**

Thank you very much for watching one of the more pointless videos I've done in a while. If you like this video, subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one. Follow me on whatever social media you like - they're all linked in the description below. I'll be streaming later today, so check that out as well in the description. And yeah, until the next video!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're gonna compare a modern high-end ish gaming system with polio to a mid-range system from more than ten years ago using some pretty powerful horse steroids in a less stupid way basically what I'm trying to determine today is how much of a bottleneck is really slow storage now the reason that I'm making this video is because a week ago I built kind of a dream mid-range Vista era gaming system and well to cut a long story short the usability on that system was atrocious now in my opinion the reason that that system was so horrendously unusable was because it had the harddrive equivalent of polio in it aka saw Tower one generation hard drives and that immediately made me wonder would putting a terrible old hard drive in a sexy new gaming system kneecap its day-to-day usability enough that it actually is worse than a much older system with an SSD in it and with that let's have a look at our two storage test subjects for today's video now the SSD is a Samsung 860 Evo it's a 500 gig version of the drive and this is pretty much as good as Santa based SSDs are ever gonna get just because of SATA being a pretty big bottleneck when it comes to SSDs and then as far as the hard drive goes we're using this old 120 gig Santa won Sampson Drive now the keen-eyed of you would have noticed that this isn't the exact same drive that I used in that Windows Vista build and that's because that hard drive itself was also it was pretty broken so I decided to get a more functioning drive so that it's a more fair test for the old-timer now this Samsung hard drive is sought a1 based which means it's very old and it's probably going to be very slow so it's gonna be interesting to see how much it me caps the performance of the new system now while talking about the SATA versions of our test subjects today it's interesting to note that the motherboard in the older system only supports SATA 2 which means that that Samsung 860 Evo Drive is actually going to be limited quite severely by the actual SATA interface on the motherboard but it's still going to be running at about 300 megabits per second which is still gonna be a lot faster then that older drive but we'll see just at what speeds these drives run at a little bit later before we look at the effect that these two drives have on their on their victims we need to actually see the specs of the victims in question now as far as the young new powerful beast system goes it has an Intel i7 9700 K in it which is hovering at around 5 gigahertz now the reason that I'm using this CPU for this test and this may trigger Gary a little bit Gary this Intel CPUs actually had the snappiest windows experience I've had on any of the systems I've used for the last 2 years or so as far as RAM goes we're using a 16 gig kit of ddr4 3600 megahertz it's a Corsair Vengeance RGB kit and this Ram kit was actually sent over for this video by Corsair now looking at the rest of the specs of the system we've got an NVIDIA r-tx 2060 in there and then we've got an NZXT n7z 390 motherboard which also looks really epic I really like that motherboard and then we're cooling the CPU with a Kraken x52 cooler so it's a pretty awesome system that we're gonna try and me cap to the best of our abilities now moving over to the specs of the older mid-range system it's got a Core 2 Duo 6300 in it paired with 4 gigs of ddr2 800 so by today's standards the dual core 1.8 gigahertz Core 2 Duo CPU is is is is not all that but we'll see how much it benefits from actually using an SSD as a boot drive now as far as the graphics card goes I actually had to swap out the graphics card that was in the previous system so I'm using a GTX 1050 Ti this was just purely for easier compatibility with Windows 10 I was having some real problems with the 9600 GT and in motherboard wise it's got a gigabyte EP 43 so it's kind of very period specific for about 2008 oh and it's also got an awesome thermal take spin cue cooler on it now first things first I timed how long it took to install Windows 10 on these two PC's off of a bootable flash drive and as you can see the brand new PC really one by quite a margin now one of the reasons that I think it took so long for the older PC to install Windows 10 is because it took really long to copy the actual install files off of the USB flash drive whereas with the new system it happened almost instantly and I think that had a really big effect on the time difference between the two installs now after I installed Windows on the two systems I did a very basic setup on the systems so I just installed graphics card drivers Google Chrome and steam on the two systems and then I decided to do an actual boot speed test to see how fast it actually takes these pcs to boot up now as you can see from this footage it's not going very well for the new young athlete that hard drive is really crippling its performance and I actually redid this test three times in a row and got the same results every time so as you can see that terrible hard drive has a huge effect on the boot times of the new system and even once it's actually booted into Windows it takes quite a long time for the system to become usable and actually responsive to inputs but once the PC is kind of settled into the launch basic things like launching the start bar and right clicking on the desktop and stuff like that is about comparable to the speed of the older system so they're kind of trading blow for blow here in fact when it comes to day to day usability it seems like the systems perform quite similarly and then just out of interest sake when downloading games on Steam onto the boot ribes of the two systems it was quite interesting to see the different metrics for the downloads and how they were interacting with the hard drives and that brings us to one of the most important tests is how quickly do games actually load on the two systems now as you can see here the older system won by quite a long shot now for this first test this was actually the first time that both of these systems loaded into that map for that specific boot cycle and in that situation the old PC with the SSD wins by quite a long shot however if on the new PC with the hard drive I actually quit the map and then load back into it it's way faster than the older PC and that's something that I noticed the first time that you do any operation on the windows Desktop for example the new system would be significantly slower than the older one but once you've done it once then the new systems way faster because then Windows cashes that information into the RAM and then it doesn't have to deal with the terrible slow hard drive so it's nice to see that Windows 10 actually has some pretty good features in place for dealing with really hectic storage based bottlenecks although once you've actually loaded into the map obviously the new system absolutely wipes the floor with the older Core 2 Duo based PC and then the final objective test that I did between the two systems was crystal disk mark and as you can see that Samsung hard drive is it's very very slow and another interesting thing to note is that the SATA 2 interface does actually hold the SSD back quite a bit although 300 megabits per second is still pretty good for snappy Windows response and it's way faster than the 30 megabits per second of the older hard drive now in conclusion how much of a difference there's an older hard drive make to the day to day usability of a brand new Beast gaming system now aside from the boot times kind of being like taking a scalpel to the eyes it's not that bad once you've got everything launched in Google Chrome launched it's snappy enough and you don't feel much of a difference between you know an SSD based boot drive and this terrible hard drive and the same goes for game load times so once the games loaded once it's not that bad and then in regards to the day to day usability of the older system with the SSD on Windows 10 the PC is surprisingly usable considering how old the hard drive is when it comes to actual gaming performance obviously it sucks because while the CPU is a huge bottleneck there but when it comes to like browsing in the Internet and stuff the PC is very much usable so if you have like an e machine that you use to browse YouTube with or Facebook or whatever and it's a very old PC putting an SSD in it is gonna make a big difference to your performance and then finally which one would I prefer for day-to-day use so you know would I rather have a new PC with a very terrible harddrive in it or an old PC with an SSD now if I did anything other than just browsing the Internet I may actually go with the older system with the SSD in it but for any other use case yeah obviously the new system is way better things take longer to use in the system is a bit more frustrating but it's still a really awesome PC and with that thank you very much for watching one of the more pointless videos I've done in a while yeah if you like this video subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one follow me on whatever social media you like I have them all linked in the description below I'll be streaming later today so check that out as well in the description and yeah until the next videotoday we're gonna compare a modern high-end ish gaming system with polio to a mid-range system from more than ten years ago using some pretty powerful horse steroids in a less stupid way basically what I'm trying to determine today is how much of a bottleneck is really slow storage now the reason that I'm making this video is because a week ago I built kind of a dream mid-range Vista era gaming system and well to cut a long story short the usability on that system was atrocious now in my opinion the reason that that system was so horrendously unusable was because it had the harddrive equivalent of polio in it aka saw Tower one generation hard drives and that immediately made me wonder would putting a terrible old hard drive in a sexy new gaming system kneecap its day-to-day usability enough that it actually is worse than a much older system with an SSD in it and with that let's have a look at our two storage test subjects for today's video now the SSD is a Samsung 860 Evo it's a 500 gig version of the drive and this is pretty much as good as Santa based SSDs are ever gonna get just because of SATA being a pretty big bottleneck when it comes to SSDs and then as far as the hard drive goes we're using this old 120 gig Santa won Sampson Drive now the keen-eyed of you would have noticed that this isn't the exact same drive that I used in that Windows Vista build and that's because that hard drive itself was also it was pretty broken so I decided to get a more functioning drive so that it's a more fair test for the old-timer now this Samsung hard drive is sought a1 based which means it's very old and it's probably going to be very slow so it's gonna be interesting to see how much it me caps the performance of the new system now while talking about the SATA versions of our test subjects today it's interesting to note that the motherboard in the older system only supports SATA 2 which means that that Samsung 860 Evo Drive is actually going to be limited quite severely by the actual SATA interface on the motherboard but it's still going to be running at about 300 megabits per second which is still gonna be a lot faster then that older drive but we'll see just at what speeds these drives run at a little bit later before we look at the effect that these two drives have on their on their victims we need to actually see the specs of the victims in question now as far as the young new powerful beast system goes it has an Intel i7 9700 K in it which is hovering at around 5 gigahertz now the reason that I'm using this CPU for this test and this may trigger Gary a little bit Gary this Intel CPUs actually had the snappiest windows experience I've had on any of the systems I've used for the last 2 years or so as far as RAM goes we're using a 16 gig kit of ddr4 3600 megahertz it's a Corsair Vengeance RGB kit and this Ram kit was actually sent over for this video by Corsair now looking at the rest of the specs of the system we've got an NVIDIA r-tx 2060 in there and then we've got an NZXT n7z 390 motherboard which also looks really epic I really like that motherboard and then we're cooling the CPU with a Kraken x52 cooler so it's a pretty awesome system that we're gonna try and me cap to the best of our abilities now moving over to the specs of the older mid-range system it's got a Core 2 Duo 6300 in it paired with 4 gigs of ddr2 800 so by today's standards the dual core 1.8 gigahertz Core 2 Duo CPU is is is is not all that but we'll see how much it benefits from actually using an SSD as a boot drive now as far as the graphics card goes I actually had to swap out the graphics card that was in the previous system so I'm using a GTX 1050 Ti this was just purely for easier compatibility with Windows 10 I was having some real problems with the 9600 GT and in motherboard wise it's got a gigabyte EP 43 so it's kind of very period specific for about 2008 oh and it's also got an awesome thermal take spin cue cooler on it now first things first I timed how long it took to install Windows 10 on these two PC's off of a bootable flash drive and as you can see the brand new PC really one by quite a margin now one of the reasons that I think it took so long for the older PC to install Windows 10 is because it took really long to copy the actual install files off of the USB flash drive whereas with the new system it happened almost instantly and I think that had a really big effect on the time difference between the two installs now after I installed Windows on the two systems I did a very basic setup on the systems so I just installed graphics card drivers Google Chrome and steam on the two systems and then I decided to do an actual boot speed test to see how fast it actually takes these pcs to boot up now as you can see from this footage it's not going very well for the new young athlete that hard drive is really crippling its performance and I actually redid this test three times in a row and got the same results every time so as you can see that terrible hard drive has a huge effect on the boot times of the new system and even once it's actually booted into Windows it takes quite a long time for the system to become usable and actually responsive to inputs but once the PC is kind of settled into the launch basic things like launching the start bar and right clicking on the desktop and stuff like that is about comparable to the speed of the older system so they're kind of trading blow for blow here in fact when it comes to day to day usability it seems like the systems perform quite similarly and then just out of interest sake when downloading games on Steam onto the boot ribes of the two systems it was quite interesting to see the different metrics for the downloads and how they were interacting with the hard drives and that brings us to one of the most important tests is how quickly do games actually load on the two systems now as you can see here the older system won by quite a long shot now for this first test this was actually the first time that both of these systems loaded into that map for that specific boot cycle and in that situation the old PC with the SSD wins by quite a long shot however if on the new PC with the hard drive I actually quit the map and then load back into it it's way faster than the older PC and that's something that I noticed the first time that you do any operation on the windows Desktop for example the new system would be significantly slower than the older one but once you've done it once then the new systems way faster because then Windows cashes that information into the RAM and then it doesn't have to deal with the terrible slow hard drive so it's nice to see that Windows 10 actually has some pretty good features in place for dealing with really hectic storage based bottlenecks although once you've actually loaded into the map obviously the new system absolutely wipes the floor with the older Core 2 Duo based PC and then the final objective test that I did between the two systems was crystal disk mark and as you can see that Samsung hard drive is it's very very slow and another interesting thing to note is that the SATA 2 interface does actually hold the SSD back quite a bit although 300 megabits per second is still pretty good for snappy Windows response and it's way faster than the 30 megabits per second of the older hard drive now in conclusion how much of a difference there's an older hard drive make to the day to day usability of a brand new Beast gaming system now aside from the boot times kind of being like taking a scalpel to the eyes it's not that bad once you've got everything launched in Google Chrome launched it's snappy enough and you don't feel much of a difference between you know an SSD based boot drive and this terrible hard drive and the same goes for game load times so once the games loaded once it's not that bad and then in regards to the day to day usability of the older system with the SSD on Windows 10 the PC is surprisingly usable considering how old the hard drive is when it comes to actual gaming performance obviously it sucks because while the CPU is a huge bottleneck there but when it comes to like browsing in the Internet and stuff the PC is very much usable so if you have like an e machine that you use to browse YouTube with or Facebook or whatever and it's a very old PC putting an SSD in it is gonna make a big difference to your performance and then finally which one would I prefer for day-to-day use so you know would I rather have a new PC with a very terrible harddrive in it or an old PC with an SSD now if I did anything other than just browsing the Internet I may actually go with the older system with the SSD in it but for any other use case yeah obviously the new system is way better things take longer to use in the system is a bit more frustrating but it's still a really awesome PC and with that thank you very much for watching one of the more pointless videos I've done in a while yeah if you like this video subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one follow me on whatever social media you like I have them all linked in the description below I'll be streaming later today so check that out as well in the description and yeah until the next video