Speed ! For Science ....

I had a daft idea today to do a little bit of FOR SCIENCE !

It's not going to be that bad. Honest.

The daft thought came up when we were talking about hard discs on one of the Discords. NOOO ! DON'T GO ! Please stay. I shall add photos of cute animals at inappropriate places.

An old one but a good one. Nah, this question got me wondering how fast the various beasties are now. I have 4x hard discs in Meltdown now ...

It boots off a Crucial M2 500GB SSD with 90 running hours on the clock now.
(Addon - that's not right. This system has been up for a continuous 13 days or 312 hours and it's had more time on than that since the build)
The last machine ran off a Crucial 250GB SSD which racked up 6258 hours.
Most of my data lives on a Western Digital 1.5TB conventional drive which has clocked up 61,626 hours.
The golden oldie is a Samsung 250GB conventional drive with ... 91,482 running hours.
That's a lot of hours. (3,811 days or 544 weeks or 10.5 years of running time).

Yep. I leave my machines on a lot but they're usually doing more Science ! in that time with the BOINC grid computing applications that help out alien signal research, medical research, astronomy and climate research.

The video I was watching has finished, so I can check out how those drives do ...
Samsung 250GB drive first - this one is ancient so it shouldn't do so good.
Read and Write speeds are both about 70MB/sec. (B for bytes, b for bits, there are 8 bits in a byte)
Input Output Per Second (IOPS) tests gave around 0.7 to 0.4 MB/s on its meter.
(I neglected to take a screenshot at the appropriate time - oops!)

Poor thing probably shouldn't be getting benchmarked these days.

Not quite dead yet though.

(Update - erm. It might be. Oops. Drive is no longer responding ! It's done this before though and came back and I have all of the data that I want off it.)

The Western Digital drive is actually about the same !

A little bit quicker on Read and Write and whereas the Samsung didn't register on the Write side, there we are. That's not actually IOPS with that 0.886, apparently it did 216.3 IOPS on that last write test and 81.8 IOPS on the read test.

Why are the two conventional drives similar ? Firstly, the Samsung drive was a performance drive in its day and the Western Digital was more of an eco friendly green variant of their drives. So it's understandable from that direction why they're so close. They're also similar technology and quite possibly, limited by the interface.

How do the SSDs do ? That's a Solid State Device drive which instead of storing the 1s and 0s as different magnetic poles on glass platters laced with chemicals, they store the data in memory.

Erm. Quite. This is the 250GB SSD that's wired up through a better type SATA cable (think it's shielded better) but still goes through the same interface protocols as the conventional drives.

But it's a whopping 6.5 times faster on raw read speed, 4.7 times faster on raw writes and 314 times faster on the Q8T8 and Q32T1 read test.

The IOPS for the last two tests were 7556.9 IOPS for the read test and 23,425.5 IOPS for the write test. The fastest was 54,041.6 IOPS for the 4KiB Q8T8 test. These are so much faster because instead of an arm physically traversing across the platter to find the data, the system just asks for the data to be read from the memory.

Can we go quicker ? Let's see. I'm doing these tests blind by the way but I kinda knew what to expect.

Here's the last one :

I thought there might be a bit more between the two SSDs to be honest there ? On the whole, a little bit quicker on top of SUPERSPEED. I'm not that bothered about it being quicker than that.

The detail numbers are 10,390.6 IOPS on the 42.56 Read and 23,504 IPS on the 96.26 Write. The fastest was 57,770.3 IOPS on the 236.6 test. It's not going as quick as the spec says it should by quite a long way (1900MB/s read, 950MB/s write, 90,000 IOPS read, 220,000 IOPS write) so I might need to do a little investigating as to why there. (It's probably set to use the wrong interface type). The drive was getting a little toasty though (63 degrees C according to one app) so I might not actually want it to go much quicker.

One thing I did notice through these tests is that the SSD read tests were pushing the processor. The Ryzen 5 3600 that I have has 6 cores capable of running 12 threads simultaneously. The read tests were maxing out one of those threads, so that might be affecting what the drive can do. It might be going beyond what the rest of the system can provide.

It's nice having hard figures though to back up that "SSDs are so much better than older style hard discs" thing !

Why does it matter though ? What's the significance of the numbers ? When it comes to raw MB/sec, not much in my opinion. We're rarely copying massive amounts of data around the system.

What we do most often is pull in lots of little bits of data. Accessing a font. Accessing configuration files. Accessing all the little pictures that make up icons and buttons. Pulling up all of the other little bits and pieces that Windows seems to need. SSDs excel at doing that ... older hard discs, not so much.

And I better leave it there !

Ok. One last cute animal pic :

Wait. Not cute animal. Still worth posting.

I have popcorn. Cya !