Hard Drive Speeds

Thu Aug 07 2014

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.

0.1 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.

0.2 5400 RPM Toshiba Laptop HHD

0.3 7200 RPM HHD

0.4 Samsung 840 EVO SSD

0.5 Kingston SSD

0.6 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.