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- Many people don’t realize that the slowest part of their computer is the hard
- drive. The read and write speeds of a hard drive affects the computer’s
- performance. The most affected processes are the boot time and time it takes to
- open an application.
-
- ![HHD throttling](media/d460663e2f964c76a15d2c07a7052d60.png)
-
- Experiment
- ----------
-
- I decided to explore the speed differences between several types of hard drives.
- In all the trials I used a program called Parkdale for speed measurements.
- \*Please note that these are just the hard drives I had lying around, there can
- be great variation of performances between different manufacturers.
-
- 5400 RPM Toshiba Laptop HHD
- ---------------------------
-
- ![5200 hhd speed](media/31210e78cc2cae122a6c3fdb93ab87c0.png)
-
- 7200 RPM HHD
- ------------
-
- ![7200 hhd speed](media/f19479753c6d86855a3a77f1cf840942.png)
-
- Samsung 840 EVO SSD
- -------------------
-
- ![ssd speed](media/3812f5e41805eb999b057c15bae19081.png)
-
- Kingston SSD
- ------------
-
- ![kingston ssd speed](media/2ac00ccdcae9b672a2f844b7f8f318c5.png)
-
- Conclusion
- ----------
-
- It may be easy to conclude that SSDs are fast and you should just use those.
- However, there is a time and a place for each of these HHDs due to their price
- point. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money to have two terabytes of SSD
- storage on my computer. My main computer has 120 GB SSD for my installation of
- Linux and a 2 TB HHD for all my personal files. In this case I get the best of
- both worlds. On one hand I get incredibly fast storage for all my programs which
- depends on read and write speeds of the HHD. On the other hand I get relatively
- cheap storage for all my movies and pictures.
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