SSD Reality-Check: All Hype or All Performance?

Solid-state drives have quickly become the new hot item in mobile computing—virtually every top-gun notebook manufacturer is now offering SSDs as an alternative to traditional hard drives.  Composed entirely of non-volatile flash memory, SSDs come with the promise of blazing fast performance, and a quieter and cooler computing experience because there aren’t any moving parts. But are they worth the splurge?

 

With prices ranging from $700 to over $3,000, solid-states drives can cost more than the notebooks they inhabit, so we decided to see if the reality matches the hype.

 

We pitted the Mtron Mobi 32GB SSD (which we borrowed from the fine folks at www.dvnation.com) against the Western Digital Scorpio 120GB hard drive (WD1200BEVS), which came pre-installed in the Gateway M-150XL notebook. We ran two benchmarks: HD Tach, software that tests read speeds, and HD Tune 2.54, which measures a hard drive’s data transfer rate and access time.

 

With the Mtron Mobi, we booted into Windows Vista in just 38.5 seconds, as opposed to 42.9 seconds with the Western Digital Scorpio; not much of a difference, but due to the fact that Windows Vista isn’t to take full advantage of solid-state drives, the minimal performance change is understandable. Oddly enough, the SSD saw a longer shutdown time than the standard HDD—26.4 seconds vs. 15.4 seconds.

 

In all other areas, the SSD-based Mtron Mobi, with its rated 1ms access time, absolutely crushed the Western Digital Scorpio WD1200BEVS. The solid-state read and wrote data at a speed of 76.9MBps and 70.7MBps, respectively. This totally outclassed the traditional HDD, which produced a read speed of 43.4MBps and a write speed of 39MBps.

 

The incredible speed differential was no doubt caused by the dramatic access time gap. In both the HD Tach 3.0 and HD Tune 2.54 tests, the Mtron Mobi was able to access data at 0.2ms (less than a millisecond!), while the Western Digital Scorpio WD1200BEVS did so at a comparatively snail-like 17.6ms.

 

In using the SSD in our day to day activities we noticed that our test laptop was pleasantly quiet, because there were no spinning platters to produce the typical grinding noise you hear when an HDD retrieves data. In addition, we enjoyed how Quicktime videos, large PDFs, and other programs opened almost instantaneously—no spinning blue balls to frustrate the impatient tech-head.

 

Are solid-state drives the real deal? You betcha. But before they go mainstream, prices will have to fall dramatically. You only need to look at the dramatic price difference in the two skus of the MacBook Air ($1,799 vs. $3,098) to see the impact of adding an SSD to a notebook. Still, if you’re an early adopter who wants the best storage performance, SSDs are the way to go.