3 ms·

ssd vs hdd perhaps?

by Infinitesimus 11y ago

ssd vs hdd perhaps?

smcl 11y ago
That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know
- davnicwil 11y ago
  For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.

ssd vs hdd perhaps?

smcl 11y ago

That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know

davnicwil 11y ago
For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.