Flash Battles Mechanical Hard Drives

If you compare the downsides of flash memory to the drawbacks of conventional hard drives, the performance gap is obvious (slow write performance and limited write cycles for flash vs. limited mechanical robustness and noticeable latencies for hard drives). We found the following table from one of SanDisk's documents for its SSD5000 flash hard drive. It doesn't take into consideration the latest hard drive generation, nor does it cover the long access times for random write operations, but it offers a good introduction for flash SSDs:

SanDisk's comparison table isn't necessarily unbiased, because there are several items on this list that we would object to (there is no mention of write access time or available capacities and hard drive performance is not covered), but it still offers a good overview about the key differences between flash SSDs and conventional drives.

SanDisk did not consider that the latest 2.5" hard drive generation is much faster, and it would be good if the firm updated its product brochure: 5,400 RPM hard drives easily reach 50 MB/s, while 7,200-RPM notebook hard drives are as fast as 60 MB/s. While there is not too much of a difference in the write performance of hard drives compared to read performance, flash drives write clearly slower (see benchmark section). Yet, the write performance of SanDisk's SSD5000 clearly is high enough to compete with any mechanical hard drive.

The read performance of this product is somewhere between impressive and plain awesome. No other drive in a 2.5" form factor offers higher transfer rates, better minimum transfer rates or quicker access time. In addition, flash-based drives will contribute to extending battery run times on notebooks, as their power requirements are 30-400% below the energy consumption of traditional 2.5" hard drives. The time saved when launching applications such as Windows is reason enough for me to purchase one of these drives for my notebook soon. Indeed, real enthusiasts have no option but to invest in a SSD, because the performance is noticeably better than with any other hardware upgrade. For everyone else, I recommend waiting until these products become more affordable, because $400 for a 32-GB SDD is pretty much the cost of a 1-TB hard drive.