Over the past few months I’ve written a series of posts about the wonders of solid-state drives (SSDs). Short version: SSDs are blazing fast, they’re a bit tricky to set up, and their fast read speeds make them ideal in the role of Windows 7 system drive.
I now have four SSD-equipped systems—two desktops and two laptops—running full time. That’s given me an opportunity to try a very interesting experiment. How do you make an already fast SSD even faster? What I found is that the combination of an SSD and a disk controller upgrade can boost performance by a minimum of 50% and can triple disk throughput speeds.
Since January, I’ve been testing a 256GB Samsung 470 Series SSD, supplied by Samsung as a review unit. (It’s packed up and ready to ship back now.) Over the past few weeks, I’ve also been testing a pair of Crucial C300 drives that I purchased as upgrades. The advantage these Crucial drives claim is that they support the SATA III bus, which is, at least in theory, twice as fast as a SATA II device.
The latest generation of PCs include onboard SATA III capabilities. For my two-year-old desktop PC I used an add-on SATA III controller (it also includes USB 3.0 support) that I paid $30 for roughly a year ago. (Sadly, it is no longer available at retail.) It connects to a PCI Express 4x slot, which also provides at least a theoretical performance boost.
So I now have this system set up with two conventional 7200 RPM hard disk drives on the SATA II (3Gb/sec) controller and two SSDs connected to the SATA III (6Gb/sec) controller. To measure performance, I put together two data sets and copied them multiple times between different drives. The first is a folder filled with 5,085 files in a wide variety of data types—pictures, music files, and documents—with a total size of 5.85GB. The other collection consists of three large disk image files in ISO format, with a total size of 3.4GB.
Here are the results. Each column represents average throughput speeds for a file-copy operation. Bigger bar = higher throughput = faster file copy. The column on the left in each group represents copies between two conventional hard disks. The two columns in the middle show mixed setups, with one SSD and one conventional disk drive. The two columns on the right represent copies from one SSD to another. In all cases, the overall result is determined by the read speed on the source drive and the write speed on the destination.
Yes, SSDs are faster. Simply introducing an SSD as the system drive and keeping the conventional drive for data storage will boost disk throughput by a minimum of 52%, based on these results. If you’re fortunate enough to have a system equipped with two fast SSDs on a SATA III controller, you will be able to copy files from point A to point B up to three times as fast as you would with two conventional SATA II drives.
I was interested to see that in one scenario a mix of an SSD and conventional hard disk drive outperformed a pair of SSDs. That experience suggests that write speeds are the weak spot of SSD performance, and that the combination of an SSD as a system drive with a fast hard disk drive for storage offers winning performance at a sane price.
So, between the Samsung and Crucial drives, which do I prefer?
