Worth upgrading 4200rpm hard drive to SSD?

[Rocko1976]

I have an HP Mini 1000 with a 80g 4200rpm pata hard drive. Is it worth upgrading to a SSD based on that it won't be Sata? Will there be a large increase in speed? Drive costs around $50 for a 64gig SSD Zif drive. Thanks.

 

[das_stig]

Found these on eBay UK, so would expect other regions to have them.

http/www.ebay.co.uk/bhp/pata-ssd-2-5

 

[Solandri]

I have an HP Mini 1000 with a 80g 4200rpm pata hard drive. Is it worth upgrading to a SSD based on that it won't be Sata? Will there be a large increase in speed? Drive costs around $50 for a 64gig SSD Zif drive. Thanks.

It depends on how you're using the computer, the speed of the PATA (IDE) connector, and the SSD.

People concentrate on the max sequential read/write speeds, but those actually don't make much difference. A modern SATA HDD can hit nearly 150 MB/s sequential speeds, while a SATA3 SSD can hit nearly 600 MB/s. So the SSD is only about 4x faster.

Where SSDs get most of their speed is from the 4k reads of small files. A 7200 RPM drive can usually manage just over 1 MB/s 4k speeds. SSDs can usually hit 30-70 MB/s at 4k speeds. So they are about 50x faster. Your 4200 RPM drive probably can't even hit 0.5 MB/s 4k speeds, so a SSD with 50 MB/s 4k speeds would be 100x faster. Even if it were limited to UDMA4 (66 MB/s).

So if the computer spends most of its time reading large files, you probably won't see any speedup. If it spends most of its time reading small files, you'll probably see a very large speedup.

But this is contingent on the SSD having decent 4k speeds. Most 64GB SSDs don't have spectacular speeds. If you can find benchmarks, that'll help you make your decision. Here's one 64GB Zif SSD I found, and as you can see the 4k speeds are only 18 and 8 MB/s. Still a lot faster than a HDD, but only 15-30x faster at 4k read/writes, not 100x faster.
http/www.mydigitaldiscount.com/runcore-64gb-pro-iv-1.8-inch-5mm-pata-zif-ssd-for-pc-and-mac

The other thing to watch out for is that 1.8" PATA drives use a different connector than 2.5" PATA drives. The HP Mini 1000 used a 1.8" HDD according to wikipedia. So make sure you're getting a 1.8" PATA SSD, not a 2.5" PATA SSD that's small enough to fit in a 1.8" bay.

 

[Rocko1976]

I have an HP Mini 1000 with a 80g 4200rpm pata hard drive. Is it worth upgrading to a SSD based on that it won't be Sata? Will there be a large increase in speed? Drive costs around $50 for a 64gig SSD Zif drive. Thanks.

It depends on how you're using the computer, the speed of the PATA (IDE) connector, and the SSD.

People concentrate on the max sequential read/write speeds, but those actually don't make much difference. A modern SATA HDD can hit nearly 150 MB/s sequential speeds, while a SATA3 SSD can hit nearly 600 MB/s. So the SSD is only about 4x faster.

Where SSDs get most of their speed is from the 4k reads of small files. A 7200 RPM drive can usually manage just over 1 MB/s 4k speeds. SSDs can usually hit 30-70 MB/s at 4k speeds. So they are about 50x faster. Your 4200 RPM drive probably can't even hit 0.5 MB/s 4k speeds, so a SSD with 50 MB/s 4k speeds would be 100x faster. Even if it were limited to UDMA4 (66 MB/s).

So if the computer spends most of its time reading large files, you probably won't see any speedup. If it spends most of its time reading small files, you'll probably see a very large speedup.

But this is contingent on the SSD having decent 4k speeds. Most 64GB SSDs don't have spectacular speeds. If you can find benchmarks, that'll help you make your decision. Here's one 64GB Zif SSD I found, and as you can see the 4k speeds are only 18 and 8 MB/s. Still a lot faster than a HDD, but only 15-30x faster at 4k read/writes, not 100x faster.
http/www.mydigitaldiscount.com/runcore-64gb-pro-iv-1.8-inch-5mm-pata-zif-ssd-for-pc-and-mac

The other thing to watch out for is that 1.8" PATA drives use a different connector than 2.5" PATA drives. The HP Mini 1000 used a 1.8" HDD according to wikipedia. So make sure you're getting a 1.8" PATA SSD, not a 2.5" PATA SSD that's small enough to fit in a 1.8" bay.

Mind Blown. Thank you so much for explaining it!