Flash Drive vs Hard Drive

[NightFire]

Which would play WoW better, a flash drive or a hard drive?

[Anozireth]

If you're talking about a USB flash drive, there is no question that a hard drive is better.

[FunkStar]

I'm not so sure about the above statement as flash drivers are SSD (solid state) while hard drives arent, therefor flash drivers are faster, the question is wether the connection through USB will make it go faster and wether a flash stick can have a buffer or not (no idea there)

USB2 supports 480 mbs, so should be fine on that part. Hard drives may still be faster because of the buffer though?

[Anozireth]

SATA2 is 3.0Gb per second. Granted, most drives can't use that much, but still, a USB flash drive isn't even close.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

SSD drives are far too expensive for the minor gains you make. If you're using it as a gaming machine, as long as you aren't comparing it to an ancient IDE hard disk, you won't be able to tell much difference. You'll be better off to spend 1/4th the price on two decent 160G normal disks and run them in RAID 0 as you'll get better performance out of that than with any of the SSDs.

[Xzin]

SOME SSD read times are faster than a HD. The SATA or IDE doesn't really matter much. People confuse bandwidth with practical throughput. A hard drive will push ~40 MB per second. A SSD can push 60 or 70 in some cases, though writing will be slower. The SSD will have far better access times than a hard drive. All told, a SSD > hard drives for WoW.

All told, a SSD will be better but in practice, the difference unless you had 5 SSDs and enough bandwidth (meaning multiple SATA channels) is going to be fairly slight for a fairly hefty (as of 2008) cost versus a single hard drive.

[Djarid]

SATA2 is 3.0Gb per second. Granted, most drives can't use that much, but still, a USB flash drive isn't even close.

Lets be clear here the SATA2 3Gb/s bus has a theoretical 3Gb/s limit but in practice? And as Xzin pointed out the drives do not have this throughput capability. That said the new hybrid drives may bring the best of both worlds... large nvram cache for regularly accessed data which, with an 8Gb cache this should allow wow to be read from the SSD cache not the disk platters

[Ughmahedhurtz]

All told, a SSD > hard drives for WoW.

Maybe I'm missing something here. SSD disks, as they stand today, are indeed faster than run-of-the-mill SATA 7200RPM HDDs by some 5-10% on average. They're actually SLOWER than a WD Raptor 10k SATA/150 drive on all fronts and you can get a Raptor 160GB drive for what a 16GB SSD will cost you or less. But with WoW and enough RAM, you never hit the disk anyway once you're done watching the loading bar, so what's the point in spending all that money? And if you're lagging/chugging when loading textures now, SSDs are NOT what you need to go upgrade to make it go away.

[edit] I take that back. There are SSDs that outperform a single non-RAID WD Raptor. But they cost $2000 for 64GB. :huh: Color me completely unimpressed, as you can setup a RAID0+1 system with redundancy AND better performance for half the price. /shrug

[Sarduci]

All told, a SSD > hard drives for WoW.

Maybe I'm missing something here. SSD disks, as they stand today, are indeed faster than run-of-the-mill SATA 7200RPM HDDs by some 5-10% on average. They're actually SLOWER than a WD Raptor 10k SATA/150 drive on all fronts and you can get a Raptor 160GB drive for what a 16GB SSD will cost you or less. But with WoW and enough RAM, you never hit the disk anyway once you're done watching the loading bar, so what's the point in spending all that money? And if you're lagging/chugging when loading textures now, SSDs are NOT what you need to go upgrade to make it go away.

[edit] I take that back. There are SSDs that outperform a single non-RAID WD Raptor. But they cost $2000 for 64GB. :huh: Color me completely unimpressed, as you can setup a RAID0+1 system with redundancy AND better performance for half the price. /shrug

They perform better in random READ tests. They do not perform faster in sequential read or any kind of write tests. Great for small static databases, poor for encoding video.

[Sarduci]

SOME SSD read times are faster than a HD. The SATA or IDE doesn't really matter much. People confuse bandwidth with practical throughput. A hard drive will push ~40 MB per second. A SSD can push 60 or 70 in some cases, though writing will be slower. The SSD will have far better access times than a hard drive. All told, a SSD > hard drives for WoW.

All told, a SSD will be better but in practice, the difference unless you had 5 SSDs and enough bandwidth (meaning multiple SATA channels) is going to be fairly slight for a fairly hefty (as of 2008) cost versus a single hard drive.

My current motherboard support 6 SATA channels split on 2 different controllers all at 3GB speeds. More than anything the type of memory used has the biggest impact in performance, if it is single or multi layer. Single is slower read, faster write than multi layer which is cheaper (more dense) and is more failure prone (one bad block kills the layered cluster). No performance tests that I've seen show sequential reads and writes vs a normal drive since nobody wants to show their product is worse than the old tech it's trying to replace. Random reads are the "bread and butter" of this tech which is why it's good for WoW and will never replace a normal enterprise solution for data storage.