Speed Up your computer with SSD

First off, if you don’t know what it means, SSD stands for Solid State Drive.  The biggest bottleneck in any computer these days is your hard drive.  We have fast CPU’s, lots of RAM, and the other technical terms you might not understand are all increased.  But hard drives still spin at a maximum 7,200 RPM unless you get the faster and also expensive 10,000 RPM which is 39% faster.  With Solid State drives, advertising says we can get upto 10 times faster, or 1,000% faster.  But looking at my personal tests below, we have some huge improvements.

Using a utility like Parkdale speed test which I’ve used in my screen shots below, you can see before and after tests of the speeds I had on my laptop hard drive.  It was running slower than normal (which is why I replaced it), I’ll give you that much, but even still, it’s a massive increase.  Have a look and I’ll explain what you’re seeing.

Parkdale HD Test Before

The hard drive before replacing was 73.9 MBps sequential write with 81.9MBps Sequential read. (Sequential meaning reading one large file or copying and pasting a set of files all at once).
The Random write was almost 800 kBps write and under 500 kBps read. (That can be sporadic typical access to the hard drive.  Also note I wrote KBps (KIloBytes per second) as opposed to MBps (MegaBytes per second) as it was with sequential read and write.

To set some perspective, 1,024 kBps = 1MBps.

The IOPS are Individual Input Output Operations Per Second.  This is basically how many individual operations can it do at the same time.  Under 200 IOPS  for read and write and that’s being generous for read.  But you’ll see in a moment as we move on to compare to the SSD tests below.

Parkdale HD Test After

There are some differences going from kBps to MBps. Let’s make a chart to have it easier to read.  The Seq Write went from 73.9 MBps to 209 MBps which is 283% faster or 2.83 times faster.  But if we look at the 2nd column for Random Write, we went from 788.6 kBps to 38.0 MBps.  Note the change from kB to MB.  The old hard drive wasn’t even 0.80 MBps and the new one is 38 MBps making it over 47 times faster or you could say 4,750% faster!

We haven’t even gotten into IOPS yet.  We went from almost 200 to over 9,700 IOPS.  That’s 48 times faster.  And ms being milliseconds to respond, (the smaller the number the better) we improved by 50 times or 5,000%

TEST Seq Write Random Write IOPS Write ms Write Seq Read Random Read IOPS Read ms Read
OLD HD 73.9 MByte/sec 788.6 kByte/sec 199.9 IOPS 5.0 ms 81.9 Mbyte/sec 466.2 kByte/sec 116.6 IOPS 8.58 ms
NEW SSD 209 Mbyte/sec 38.0 Mbyte/sec 9,726.7 IOPS 0.10 ms 117.8 Mbyte/sec 18.5 Mbyte/sec 4,734.7 IOPS 0.21 ms
% Improved 282.8 4,822.3 4,865.8 5,000.0 143.8 3,970.0 4,060.6 4,085.7

So… as you can see in the chart above, we improved by a minimum 143.8% via sequential read, but up 5,000% with ms response time to write.  Overall, you’ll see boot up time and shut down of the computer is much faster as well as overall use.  Obviously when typing a word document or working on a spread sheet, it doesn’t mean you’ll be any faster, unless you can type really fast. 🙂  But transferring files and loading applications will be no more wait times.

The question now would be is it worth paying over 3-4 times the price of a regular hard drive to get this extra speed?

Here’s Microsoft’s ratings on my computer before and after the upgrade as well.  First, the before picture.

Rating Before

Now below is my rating after the SSD hard drive was cloned over to.

Rating After

You can see the hard drive improved from 5.9 to 7.9 and I totally notice the difference.  However the base score is still 5.9 because my graphics is the same, but for what I use the computer for, the hard drive was the biggest bottleneck, and so it’s made the biggest improvement.