And it drops all the way down to 90 at the very center, the drop is more pronounced then on an SSD.
Then empty both drives and find TRIM won’t fix the problem. You need to secure erase it. So the empty SSD will still have slow write speeds while the empty HDD will write faster until it hits about the middle of its platter.
Also the drive tested was 240GB. So, we have a short-stroked Hitachi offering 500GB at 160-180 MB/sec sequential, or we have the SSD giving you 160MB/sec across 240GB, with the latter costing ten times more per GB, and having less than half the capacity.
As for the real world, it’s possible somebody that writes big video files and fills up the drive might run into this problem. Big video files are sequential and are usually already compressed.
And again, just looking at the sequential speed when most real world stuff is limited by random speed. At which modern SSDs get 100x that of a HDD.
Uh no, maybe in synthetics but not in the real world:
That test used 22,696 files with an average size of 39.4KB, for a total size of 923MB. It’s a real life random access file copy, not some synthetic 4KQD32 rubbish.
Surprise, the VelociRaptor beats the M4 and doesn’t do too badly against the other SSDs. The fastest SSD in their test isn’t even twice as fast, much less 100 times like you claim.
And the Raptor has four times the capacity so it can comfortably fit all my games and data, unlike any of those SSDs. And it won’t crap itself if you RAID it because it doesn’t need TRIM.
Are you kidding? for every new generation of HDDs horror stories are abound.
So yes, I will argue the "fact" that SSDs have more firmware issues.
Please start by listing three documented critical HDD firmware bugs in recent memory. I can list three for SSDs: OCZ BSOD, Intel 8MB, Crucial timer bug.
Heck, Anand’s review said OCZ was still blue screening during BF3 even with the latest firmware.
That would be the steam client, but what of the games. How fast do they load levels? Has texture pop been reduces?
Level load times are typically a few seconds faster, but only the first time you load them after booting the system. After that there’s no benefit because it’s all cached. Also the vast majority of my games don’t stream and instead load the entire level into memory, so I/O won’t help there.
I’m not going to go through my entire library and figure out which games stream so I can manually copy those to an SSD. If I wanted to waste time coddling my data like that then I’d stick to a RAM disk. I don’t need an SSD for that.
why don't you use one of the steam game relocators?
Because the few seconds I save from an SSD the first time I load a level is more than offset by the maintenance time needed to keep such a system in operation.