NVMe vs SSD vs HDD Performance
A lot has changed in the world of computer storage in the past decade. Traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDD) have been outperformed by insanely fast and now affordable Solid State Drives (SSD). And now we have insanely faster flash memory technology already available for the consumer market in the shape of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), which is manufactured in a number of different interfaces / form factors, including M.2.
Many photographers, including myself, experienced a huge boost in performance for post-processing large resolution files when switching from a hard drive to an SSD, but now that the faster flash memory is becoming more common, one might be wondering about the benefits of this new storage compared to both HDD and SSD drives. We have already published a detailed article on building a computer for photography based on the latest generation Intel Skylake architecture, where we recommended to get the new generation motherboards with built-in M. 2 slots for flash storage. Having built a similar computer myself for my post-processing and video editing needs, I thought it would be useful to share just how much faster the new storage is compared to both HDD and SSD drives, since I use all three in my large full tower setup.
Many photographers still actively rely on hard disk drives, since they not only give more bang for the buck when compared to other storage types, but also provide a lot more storage to work with. And considering that photographs and video take enormous amounts of storage space, it is given that HDDs would be far more popular in comparison to everything else. When buying a brand new laptop or a computer, it is tough to decide what to go for – a much smaller, but faster SSD / PCIe flash memory, or a large capacity hard drive. And what makes it even more confusing, is that we now have hybrid hard drives, also known as “Fusion” drives, which are supposed to give the benefits of both SSD and HDD storage in a single package.
What is the best storage type for photography needs? Such questions are very common among photographers, who try to plan their storage needs when shopping for new hardware.
Unfortunately, there is no single right answer for everyone, because it all depends on each photographer’s workflow and how much storage is needed. For beefy storage environments with tens or even hundreds of thousands of RAW images and videos, no single type of storage would be sufficient, because there would most likely be two environments in place – one for current active projects (fast storage) and one for passive projects / archival (slower, large capacity storage). For smaller environments, a fast flash drive with a combination of either internal or external hard drive would suffice, where the photographer would place their operating system files, along with their active image catalog on the fastest flash storage, while storing images in slower, large capacity hard drives. And for someone who is starting out, a single, do-it-all drive would most likely suffice, with storage type depending on budget.
For my personal and business needs, I have been heavily relying on SSD and HDD drives during the past years, some of which are placed in my computer, while others are a part of a large Synology storage array. With 10+ years of images and the various video projects that I am currently working on, storage has been a very essential and integral part of my workflow, as I need to re-address both capacity and performance needs every few years. The main reason is time – if I can save hours of my time by using faster storage, it translates to more efficiency for the entire workflow. And I am not just talking about pure editing time, as storage is used for other critical parts of workflow, such as backup, as well.
After upgrading my large tower machine with all-new computer components, which include the new flash storage in M.2 form factor (I rely on the currently fastest consumer-grade M.2 drive, the Samsung 512 GB 960 Pro M.2 NVMe), I decided to test out every drive of my new build and see what kinds of gains I would expect in terms of both read and write speeds.
The results were quite shocking, as you can see below:
In just read performance alone, my M.2 drive turned out to be a whopping 25x times faster than my enterprise-grade WD 2 TB 7200 RPM drive. That is just mind boggling, considering that SSD is only around 5x times faster in comparison. In write speed, I was able to witness up to 15x more performance, which is also a very impressive number. And that’s just for one type of sequential read/write load – if you look at the above numbers, other performance metrics indicate even larger, more noticeable gains.
What does this all translate to? With so many camera manufacturers pushing for more resolution, many of us have been experiencing performance issues, with storage often being the bottleneck. If one can place their image catalogs on the fastest drive and use faster drives for storage of RAW images and video footage, the performance gains can be tremendous, especially during intensive workloads such as image and video export.
And once file copy / move operations are involved, those benefits can become even more significant, especially for a busy professional.
One thing to note – I am not suggesting that one would experience 25x performance gains just by switching from a hard drive to a flash drive when editing images, since there are many other factors involved, such as overall speed of the computer (CPU speed, number of CPU cores, total RAM and its speed, etc), the ability of the software to take full advantage of both the computer resources and the storage, etc. The software numbers from the above benchmarks might not apply the same way for everyday work.
Disclosures, Terms and Conditions and Support Options
Filed Under: Storage Hardware and Software Tagged With: Computer, HDD, NVMe, PCIe, Storage
PassMark Software — Hard Drive Benchmark Charts
PassMark Software has delved into the thousands of benchmark results that PerformanceTest users
have posted to its web site and produced four charts to help compare the relative performance of
different hard drive models with storage capacities from gigabyte to terabytes.
Our charts
include results from many major hard drive manufacturers, including but (not limited to)
Seagate, Western Digital (WDC), Hitachi, Maxtor and Samsung. Our data can help you assess the
performance of your hard disk drive (HDD) in comparison to similar models, or help you decide
whether newer hard drive technologies (such as solid state hard drives) represent good value for
your purchasing dollar when it comes to high performing data storage and retrieval.
Most Popular Benchmarks
Search for your Disk Drive
High End Drive Chart
Best Value Drive Chart
Most Common Drive Chart
Hard Drives by Performance
High End Drive Chart
High to Mid Rang Drive Chart
Low to Mid RangeDrive Chart
Low End Drive Chart
Sequential Read Drive Chart
Sequential Write Drive Chart
Random Seek Read/Write Drive Chart
IOPS 4KQD1 Drive Chart
Best Value
Most Common Drive Chart
Best Value Drive Chart
Solid State Drive
(SSD) Chart
Large Drives Chart
Latest and hottest
30 Day Market Share
Info to DecodingDrive Names
Drive ChartMega List Page
Search for yourDisk Drive
Last updated on the
14th of December 2022
Benchmark Test Description
Hard Drive Benchmark results (“Baselines”) were gathered from users’ submissions to the PassMark web site as well as from
internal testing.
PerformanceTest conducts three different tests and then averages the results
together to determine the PassMark
Disk Mark rating for a system… [ Read the entire article ]
Notes Related to the Graphs
Rarely is a graph completely accurate in what it is representing. There are many factors that can
skew the results and make a graph misleading. As such it is necessary to have some background
understanding of the data being presented.
In the case of these Hard Drive Benchmarks there are several factors to consider, such as
different system setups the
Hard Drives are running under and how fragmented the drives file
system is…. [ Learn more about the graphs ]
Current Top Ten List
#1 WD BLACK SN850X 2000GB
#2 WD BLACK SN850X HS 2000GB
#3 WD BLACK SN850X 4000GB
#4 INTEL SSDPF21Q800GB
#5 NVMe WD BLACK SN850X 2000GB
#6 Samsung SSD 990 PRO 1TB
#7 Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gaming
#8 WD BLACK SN850X HS 1000GB
#9 Samsung SSD 990 PRO 2TB
#10 WD BLACK SN850 PS5 1TB
How to Add Your Own Hard Drive
Download and install PerformanceTest.
Start PerformanceTest then from the menu bar select «Tests->Run All Tests».
Once the tests have run select «Baseline->Upload Baseline to Web».
Your results will not appear in the graphs immediately as the graphs are only updated once per
day. Additionally, only
Hard Drives of which there are at least three samples are included in the graphs.
Comparison of SSD and HDD drives in real use / Sudo Null IT News
In this article, we will find out how and to what extent an SSD affects performance in real-world use.
If you have long wanted to see the real performance of SSDs compared to conventional HDDs, or if you have been thinking about moving your system to an SSD, but did not know if it was worth it, this article is for you!
It makes little sense to test a disk under ideal conditions, because. this does not happen in real life, so I intend to consider tests using examples from real life, when the disk is filled with thousands of files, games, cache files of browsers and video processing programs, etc.
So stock up on popcorn, sit back, and let’s get down to business.
What is the problem with HDD drives?
The problem is that the normal HDDs we still use in computers have not changed since 1990x wiki when it was first decided ref to make HDDs running at 4300 rpm and 5400 rpm
It was 2016 — 20-25 years later, we still have the same 5400 rpm drives running at 60-90 MB/s, but user needs have changed a long time ago, now we are working with huge projects and a large number of files in multitasking mode, requiring a lot of bandwidth and disk responsiveness, even if several other programs are already running in the background.
Starting in 2001, some manufacturers started to release consumer segment drives running at 7200 rpm instead of 5400, but this did not change anything, the increase from 90 MB/s to 120 MB/s (33% — 5400-7200) is still does not have a significant effect.
Tests | synthetic (potential disk speeds)
Below is a synthetic test that compares the performance of the most important aspect — the operation of a disk with small data blocks (in particular 4 kb):
During read operations
- HDD is 94 times slower than (0.
68 MB/s vs. 63.6 MB/s), compared to SSD - HDD is 53 times slower than (0.36 MB/s vs. 19 MB/s) compared to SSD
During write operations
- HDD is 178 times slower than (0.78 MB/s vs. 139 MB/s), compared to SSD
- HDD is 86 times slower than (0.64 MB/s vs 55 MB/s) compared to SSD
Why are we mainly interested in the result of disk operation with small data blocks?
The thing is, whether you open a browser or you import a project consisting of hundreds of files into a program like Unreal Engine, no matter what you do, in all such cases, the computer processes a huge number of small blocks of data (mostly reads , so read speed is usually more important than write speed)
Sequential speed («Seq Q32T1» and «Seq» in the screenshot above) is important when writing / reading large files (MB or GB), which happens less often, and does not affect system responsiveness to the same extent as working with thousands of small ones blocks.
Why are Apple computers much more responsive than regular PCs and «never» slow down?
In the world of computers, there is an opinion that the whole trouble is in the operating system — Mac OSX on Apple computers is “optimized”, “never slows down”, “there are no blue screens of system failure”
Maybe it’s because:
Apple computers (not counting the cheapest ones): have all the same components, except for one — m.2 SSD drive / proprietary counterparts:
— Running at speed (700 — 1100 MB/s) via NVMe, being able to process 65000 waiting threads, executing 65000 commands every
— Having data loss prevention systems, overheating protection systems that help prevent errors and freezes when working with several GB of data, consisting mainly of small blocks, in multitasking mode
— etc. etc.
Whereas, experience with Windows PC was formed when working with computers that have:
— Normal HDD 5400 rpm (noisy and vibrating during operation, due to the presence of moving parts) with the ability to process 1 waiting thread, executing 32 commands
— Running at speed (60 — 110 MB / s)
— Constantly forcing all users to observe the state — «Not responding», to observe the mockingly slow reaction when working in multitasking mode, not only with small, but also with relatively large blocks of data.
Leaving all the other components of the computer in place, swap the disks, putting a 5400 rpm HDD on an Apple and an m.2 SSD on a Windows PC, and it turns out that the disk is really the most important (for speed and responsiveness) part of the computer, because . a regular HDD is very slow, and makes the whole system wait until it finishes processing all the task queues from programs and the OS, which slows down a lot when multitasking, in addition, having applications doing work in the background, which can be quite a lot — from auto-updating project dependencies, to tasks set for processing by the user himself.
Now, let’s move on to the tests!
Test configuration | Real world tests
All test results are based on a laptop with these components:
OS: Windows 10
CPU: i7 3610qm
RAM: 12GB
Subject:
HDD: Toshiba MQ01ABF050 | 465 GB (SATA)
SSD: Kingston HyperX Fury | 120 GB (SATA)
| Upgrade clean Windows 7 to Windows 10
SSD Total time: ~9 minutes — 188% faster (2.
9x)
HDD Total time: ~26 minutes
First 4 lines — Windows 10 update process
The last line is a test to make sure the update process is complete and the PC is ready to go.
| Windows 10 startup time
SSD Windows and tray program startup time: 0:16 | Total time: 0:23 — 217% faster (3.17x)
HDD Startup time for Windows and tray programs: 0:48 | Total time: 1:13
PDF opened immediately after desktop appeared
The countdown ended after loading the programs in the tray and fully opening the PDF file
| Application Launch Time
SSD Application Launch Time | Total time: 1:44 — 274% faster (3.74x)
HDD Application launch time | Total time: 6:29
| Time to complete tasks in apps
SSD Perform tasks in applications | Total time: 2:29 — 175% faster (2.
75x)
HDD Application task execution | Total time: 6:50
Results
Judging by the tests and sensations, our experimental HyperX Fury SSD outperformed the HDD in all respects in 100% of cases, solving a headache in all areas that require high system responsiveness, such as game creation, video / audio processing, particle simulation, post-processing, work with hundreds of GB of data or thousands of OpenEXR.
After switching to an SSD drive, no more noticeable stuttering issues, whether it’s processing speed issues in AE, due to your sublime text downloading dependency updates using 100% of the disk at that time, or stopping work due to the fact that you have BVH calculated in the background before rendering in blender, or while Maya, for several hours, creates alembic cache files, not even allowing you to go to the Internet without freezing.
Not noticeable anymore and no waiting until Audacity droops, after reducing the audio track, every 2 minutes and no waiting until all HDR or EXR in the folder is loaded every time for 1-3 minutes (!).
You no longer have to stop one application in order to speed up the responsiveness of others, because. it loaded the disk at 100%. You don’t have to wait a few seconds after each action in Unreal Engine, in any aspect of work, from importing files, to applying and testing assets.
Not to mention the speed of rebooting the system after updates, which happens in seconds instead of minutes, and the opening of applications, which is now «relatively» instantaneous.
Etc., etc., if you have come across all this, you understand me well and it makes no sense to continue writing resolved problems, but if you don’t understand what it is about, most likely you will get bored reading a couple of hundred more problems resolved with an SSD, anyway.
From personal experience, I noticed that while working on a computer with an HDD, you don’t notice how unproductive and irritable the work is due to constant expectations, and the “not responding” status, especially if your work at the computer is not limited to climbing on the Internet .
Bottom line — do you need an SSD?
If you need a drive:
- Absolutely silent operation (unlike a HDD that has moving parts that create noise and vibration)
- A disk that does not make you nervous, due to endless waiting and slow programs from the stage of opening the program — working in it — and until it is closed, just because, unlike all other PC components and programs, the speed of HDD drives The consumer segment hasn’t evolved in the last 20 years.
- If you need a drive that has several times the speed and responsiveness advantage over an HDD in all types of tasks, from Internet browsing to multitasking typical of code / game development, 3D graphics, animation, particle simulation / video processing, audio / etc.
In that case, SSD is for you
Poll
Comparison of SSD and HDD speeds
The article is devoted to the performance analysis of solid state drives and hard drives.
An article has already been presented on our website, which details the pros and cons of SSDs. But this time I would like to focus on comparing the speed characteristics of these devices and tell in detail how great the advantage of solid state drives is.
Quite often we hear that the superiority of SSD in performance is not so significant — «only» 3-4 times. For example, the maximum speed of advanced hard drives is about 160-170 MB / s, while an SSD can show about 550 MB / s. A simple calculation gives a difference of almost 3.5 times. However, the processes that occur when reading information from the media are much more complicated, and it is incorrect to directly compare the maximum speeds.
Test results for SSD Vertex 3 and HDD Seagate 3 TB
(clickable)
Take a look at two device test results using the popular CrystalDiskMark software. It will allow you to compare both types of drives in different operating modes. The first drive is an SSD manufactured by OCZ called Vertex 3, which has very high performance.
The second is a modern 3TB Seagate hard drive with very high performance. We can say that some of the best representatives of each market segment are compared.
The top number on the left is the linear read speed when data is read sequentially. In this mode, almost all types of media show their maximum capabilities. The hard disk does not have to constantly move heads, and most of the time is spent reading and transferring data. The solid state drive, in turn, transmits data in large blocks, while using all channels. This behavior of devices is usually observed when copying huge files — movies, archives, DVD images. The speed difference between the two devices is 3.27 times.
Second row of digits — reading in 512k blocks. The hard drive starts spending more time moving heads looking for each block, so the speed slows down. An SSD has to do more calculations to access different flash memory cells. Please note that SSD performance is 92% of the maximum, while a conventional hard drive is only 37%.
This behavior corresponds to copying a set of small photos and illustrations or audio files.
The next row is reading in very small blocks of 4 KB. It is in this test that the speeds sag the most. A classic hard drive spends the lion’s share of time moving heads in search of the right pieces of information, and a hard drive performs a huge amount of calculations to find the right cells. As a result of this, the speed of the hard drive dropped by 220 times, and that of the SSD — only 15 times. Speed difference between two DUTs on 4K blocks is 52 times . This mode of operation corresponds to the process of loading the operating system, launching applications and copying text documents — that is, the most frequent operations on a PC.
Now it’s time to talk about the parallel execution of operations. While working on a computer, many processes are running in the system — programs and applications, system utilities, services that can access the drive at any time.
It turns out that at one point in time several requests for reading can come. The hard disk is forced to process them one at a time — the heads can only read one file at a time. But the SSD has several memory chips that store information. Therefore, you can process several requests at once, and all of them will be executed in parallel.
The last line just shows the speed of work on 4K blocks with a request queue of 32. That is, a situation is simulated when 32 files of this size need to be read at once. As you can see, the hard drive has almost no differences in parallelization, since it can only receive one file at a time, and the SSD reads data in several streams, which allows you to increase performance by 5.25 times. A small difference in speeds between a hard drive with and without a queue is due to the presence of NCQ technology, which somehow arranges this very queue so as not to “run back and forth 2 times”.
For the sake of objectivity, it should be noted that such a deep queue almost never occurs in real conditions.
For example, when the operating system boots, the queue value is approximately four.
In other words, if in theory (according to the documentation) the devices differ by 3.5 times, then in real operations when the computer is running, the difference can reach much larger values.
The right column in the program window is the results of the recording for which all of the above is true.
SSD (bottom) vs. HDD (top) speed distribution comparison
But that’s not all. Take a look at the other graphics made by HD Tune. They show the distribution of speeds over the storage space (blue line). The left part corresponds to the beginning of the disk, the right part corresponds to the end. If the SSD gives the same speed on almost the entire volume, then by the middle of the space, reading (and writing) seriously sags in the hard drive, and at the end it drops by more than 2 times. In practice, this means that if the operating system was installed on a full disk, or the last partition on the device, then the performance of the drive will be noticeably lower than declared.