HDD vs SSD on a Netbook – Acer Aspire One D250

My Acer Aspire One D250 came with a standard mechanical hard drive, and recently I acquired another SSD drive so I figured why not swap the HDD out for the SSD as that seems the popular way to go these days. Now I knew the read and write speeds of the SSD would be much faster than the lowly 5400RPM hard drive, but I was curious as to how much of an actual affect it had on the system as a whole though. I wanted to know just how much an SSD effects everything in the system and not just the transfer rates or read/writes. So of course I took the time to run a whole lot of tests, not only comparing the SSD to the HDD but I ran system wide tests as well to see where anything might be different, or if anything had improved elsewhere besides just the reads and writes. So read on t find out what I did…

The Drives::

The hard drive that comes with the Acer Aspire One D250-1165 is a Hitachi 160GB version. It’s specifically the HTS543216l9a300 (5400RPM/3g/8mb). The SSD is the Patriot 128GB Warp SSD Drive PE128GS25SSDR. I figured why not use one that was closer in size to the original drive, and that was one I had lying around..

The drives are exactly the same, at least the data is, I cloned the Hitachi hard drive onto the SSD so it’s technically an exact copy of it.

Performance and Comparison:

The first thing I did with these drives was test the Battery Life with the HDD and with the SSD.

To do this test I used Battery Eater Pro which gives us a minimum battery life using the Classic Mode.

Here’s a quote from the site about the program and Classic Mode:

Battery Eater is a testing tool intended to reveal the potential of a notebook battery pack. Battery Eater can measure the minimum operation time of a notebook (when all power-saving options are disabled) under conditions close to the maximum workload (Classic mode). You should be aware, though, that such conditions rarely occur during an ordinary use of a notebook and should be regarded as reflecting the minimum time the notebook can work on its battery.

BEPro has a nice feature where it tells you the charge of the battery and then once you unplug the adapter the program will start running, so it’s truly being tested starting from 100% battery life. I used a stopwatch/timer to track the time, and stopped the timer when the netbook automatically powered itself down.

Here’s the Results: (Hours:Minutes:Seconds)

Hitachi HDD: 1:49:37

Patriot SSD: 2:01:32

So we gained about 10 minutes battery life using the SSD, but you have to remember this is the minimum time or battery life under load. Most people will not be using there netbook at 100% CPU usage as the program does.

So I could have easily just tested the hard drive performance and then compared them, but that’s not what I wanted to know. I wanted to know how much, if any, of a performance increase or decrease would switching to a faster SSD have on the entire system. So of course I’ve got the standard tests for the hard drives, and entire system tests as well, and then I’ve got the old standby SiSoft Sandra that tests more specific components along with the drives.

We’ll start off with ATTO that gives us read and write speeds for the drives:

As you can see according to the ATTO Disk Benchmark the Patriot pretty much blows the Hitachi out of the proverbial water when it comes to read and writing speeds.

Normally I like to group the SiSoft Sandra tests together, but for this little article I’m not.

So next up is the Physical Disks Benchmark -Read Performance from the Sandra suite. I can only run the Read test on the disks as to run the Write performance test the disk needs to be blank.

Physical Disks -Read Performance

Benchmark hard disks (i.e. the disk itself, not the file system).

As the test measures raw performance it is independent on the file system the disk uses and any volumes mounted off the disk.

Drive Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the highest read or write speed across the whole disk. Thus the higher the better.

Access Time: is the average time to read a random sector on the disk, analogous to latency response time. Thus the lower the better.

As expected the Patriot easily bests the Hitachi with the Random Access Time actually less than the Milliseconds of the benchmark. The Patriot recorded nanoseconds for the Random Access Time.

The next one from Sandra would be the File Systems Benchmark, this one is a little bit different in that it doesn’t focus on raw performance but the performance of a populated volume.

File Systems

Benchmark mounted file systems (i.e. volumes). Shows how your file systems connected to storage adapters and storage hosts compare to other devices in a typical computer.

This is not the raw disk performance that other benchmarks test – but the speed of the volume itself that depends on many more factors like file system, operating system cache, position on disk, etc. Thus this is the performance you get at the file system level.

Drive Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. The Drive Index is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC. A larger number means better performance. The weighting of the results is not equal it represents the distribution of different files sizes as used on these devices (obtained through field research).

Even with the drive populated by files we can easily see that the Patriot is much better than the Hitachi mechanical disk by a wide margin.

Here are the Detailed Benchmark results for each drive if you’re curious:

Patriot SSD:

Detailed Benchmark Results

Buffered Read : 96MB/s

Sequential Read : 115MB/s

Random Read : 112.25MB/s

Buffered Write : 35.73MB/s

Sequential Write : 49.84MB/s

Random Write : 30MB/s

Random Access Time : 210µs

Hitachi HDD:

Detailed Benchmark Results

Buffered Read : 125.16MB/s

Sequential Read : 54.18MB/s

Random Read : 34.87MB/s

Buffered Write : 71MB/s

Sequential Write : 53.15MB/s

Random Write : 31.2MB/s

Random Access Time : 10.22ms

Now let’s move into more system wide performance testing.

First up we’ll check with Cinebench10.

CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses your computer’s performance capabilities. MAXON CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real-world circumstances.

The test procedure consists of two main components: The first test sequence is dedicated to the computer’s main processor. A 3D scene file is used to render a photoreaslistic image. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. During the first run the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core) to ascertain a reference value. On computers that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores and on those that simulate multiple CPUs (via HyperThreading or similar technolgies), MAXON CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power.

The second test measures graphics card performance and is run inside the 3D editor window. The project file used can test all graphics cards that support the OpenGL standard. In this scene, only the camera was animated. This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed.

Clearly there’s no real difference when it comes to this test, sure a couple points here and there, but no real discernible difference in the real world.

How about a few CPU related tests thrown in there…

First up is SiSoft Sandra CPU Multi-Media.

Processor Multi-Media

Benchmark the (W)MMX(2), SSE(2/3/4), AVX processor units. Shows how your processors handle multi-media instructions and data in comparison to

other typical processors.

Such operations are used by more specialised software, e.g. image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games.

Results Interpretation

Multi-Media Integer (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better integer performance.

Multi-Media Single/Double Float (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better floating-point performance.

We actually see a slight increase in most of the tests while using the SSD drive, but again nothing spectacular at all.

Next we have Sandra CPU Arithmetic:

Processor Arithmetic

Benchmarks the ALU and FPU processor units. Shows how your processors handle arithmetic and floating point instructions in comparison to other

typical processors.

Results Interpretation

Dhrystone (MIPS) – higher results are better, i.e. better integer performance.

Whetstone (MFLOPS) – higher results are better, i.e. better floating-point performance.

As expected not much of a difference at all, a slight improvement in some areas but nothing to get excited over.

The next test would be Sandra Cache and Memory, another CPU based test:

Processor Cache and Memory

Benchmark the processors’ caches and memory access (transfer speed).

Results Interpretation

Cache/Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.

Speed Factor (MB/s) – lower results are better, i.e. less difference between processor cache speed and memory speed.

Combined Index: is a composite figure representing the overall performance rating of the entire Cache-Memory performance in terms of MB/s. The

value is the logarithmic average of all the results for the entire address space. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance)

Speed Factor: is a figure representing the speed differential between the CPU’s cache and memory. The value is the ratio of the fastest cache (i.e. L1)

bandwidth to the main memory bandwidth. (Lower is better, i.e. the memory is not very much slower than CPU’s cache)

…and yet again a very slight difference, nothing that would ever be noticeable to the end user.

So next is Sandra Memory Latency test:

Memory Latency

Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory

The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor

clock speed.

The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed.

Here’s an oddball and surprising result, same ram, different storage system yields lower latency for the ram… hmmm…

The next test would be another SiSoft Sandra Test, the Memory Bandwidth test:

Memory Bandwidth

Benchmark the memory bandwidth of your computer.

Results Interpretation

Integer Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.

Float Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth

Here again we see a very slight lead with the SSD drive installed, still though not much that would translate into anything in the real world that you might actually feel from the system.

I grabbed a new test to try out PassMark PerformanceTest that tests the entire system

Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing and benchmarking. PassMark PerformanceTest allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.

In addition to the standard tests, there are 7 summary results plus the overall “PassMark Rating” result. The benchmark results are presented as easy to read bar charts so that you don’t need to spend hours studying the number to know the result. Timing for the tests is done using high resolution timers, which are accurate to approximately 1 millionth of a second on most PC’s.

So that’s the overall graph, no surprise there right. Let’s look at the individual scorings:

If we look at those scores you’ll see that only the 3D Graphics Mark remained the same between both types of drives. The scorings suggest that the SSD truly does provide an almost overall system enhancement.

The last test I’ve got is CrystalMark and here you will see a huge difference between using an SSD and using a common mechanical hard drive:

There’s an unmistakable difference in that graph when using the SSD compared to the HDD.

But here’s the breakdown of the CrystalMark Testing:

In most all areas we saw an improvement when using the SSD drive, the OpenGL test was the only one where there really wasn’t much of a change at all. The OpenGL testing result does coincide with the results I got from Cinebench10 as well. In Cinebench10 the OpenGL test results were the same actually. Obviously most of the score difference was from the hard drive tests, a good 10,000 points difference, but the other results can’t be ignored either.

Conclusion:

So what can we conclude here? Well, for the most part, the entire system will benefit from a faster hard drive, or an SSD and not just your read and write speeds.

Most people think that the only benefit you’ll get from a better hard drive is faster access times. A lot of people don’t think about how much of the operating system itself relies on the hard drive and thus upgrading it is essentially an upgrade to the entire system itself.

A faster hard drive will mean your entire system will perform much better overall. While it might not be truly that significant of a difference there still is one, there’s no doubt there. Of course though you can achieve similar results in terms of performance just by grabbing one of the new 7200RPM or even one of the 10,000 RPM 2.5” hard drives out there, but you’re going to be using more power thus cutting your battery life that much more.

Yes SSD drives are rather expensive especially when you compare them to their mechanical counterparts, but they are dropping in price and as companies release newer, faster ones, the previous generation will drop in price. Just by waiting a bit you can get a very good SSD for a much lower price than it was originally sold for.

SSDs also have the obvious benefit of not being mechanical of course, so there’s less of a chance you’ll lose any data should you drop your laptop or netbook. The laptop might be shot but most likely your data will still be intact, with a mechanical hard drive you risk the chance of a head crash in a fall or other problems as well that could effectively render your data useless or it will cost you quite a bit of money in data recovery fees.