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4. HDTune Pro Ver. 4.5 – Benchmark
Remember what we said about that nice smooth graph line? Things just don’t get much sweeter than this. HDTune Pro also displays the disk access time for the user which is a pretty consistent 0.1-0.2ms for all solid state drives. This is a pretty important score because it is through understanding of this that we realize exactly why the SSD is so much faster than the hard drive. The hard drives typical access time is around 9ms which is some 90 times slower than the SSD. It doesn’t stop there though.
An SSD finds the information which is retrieved in a continuous fashion, much like oil in a pipeline. The hard drive, however, has to find the specific spot that the information is located on a disk that is spinning at unimaginable speeds as fast as 10000rpm. If the file is large, it simply cannot retrieve it all with one sweep and must start the process over again in locating and retrieving the file until it is fully picked up. This is where you will see a significant decline in performance for a hard drive compared to a SSD. Just for the heck of it why don’t we quickly run the same test of our new Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB hard drive and see if we can demonstrate this?
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We are enjoying this review so much we thought we would throw in two hard disk drive scores, the left being the Samsung Spinpoint and the right being our older Seagate 160GB hard drive. Its pretty fascinating comparing these to that of the SSD above.
HDTune Pro Ver. 4.5 – File Benchmark
HDTune Pro Ver. 4.5 – Random Access
HDTune Ver. 4.5 – Extra Tests
5. File Transfer Speed Test
This was a simple real life test where 2.93GB of data was placed onto the test drive and then moved onto a different part of the drive to test the transfer max of that drive, given the composition of the data. The data was random and consisted of everything from zip files to music, movies, small OS applications and just about anything we could throw in there. This has been done in previous reviews with other drives, however, all of the tests were fresh for this drive. Look closely and you will see, not only SSDs but also, a Mini-PCIe and a USB Flash Drive!!