# Is SSD faster than HDD



## lostsoul62

I have a SATA 3 WD 1TB HDD that is 6Gb/s and if I buy a SSD it is also rated at 6Gb/s however the SSD cost 10 times more for each byte so what am I missing?


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## claptonman

A standard HDD will never reach 6 gb/s. Even a 3gb/s drive is all the fast its gonna get. An SSD is 10x faster than a HDD.

They put the 6gb/s on the HDDs so people know its compatible with 6gb/s ports on the motherboards.


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## lostsoul62

claptonman said:


> A standard HDD will never reach 6 gb/s. Even a 3gb/s drive is all the fast its gonna get. An SSD is 10x faster than a HDD.
> 
> They put the 6gb/s on the HDDs so people know its compatible with 6gb/s ports on the motherboards.



A SATA 3 hard drive is rated at 6 gb/s which is in therory. A SSD is rated at 6 gb/s so how is that 10 times faster?
I took a look at some other sites and posts and it's partly about access time and so forth so I think I'm understanding better and will get a 60 Gig SSD for my OS, Thanks


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## TrainTrackHack

SSDs are faster, but most of the speed increase comes from SSDs seek times (which are essentially zero since there's no mechanical hardware moving about) - you can't compare just the transfer rates, but even if you do SSDs take the lead. Even the fastest HDDs will only reach about ~100MB/s, which is nowhere near the 600MB/s theoretical maximum of SATA 6Gb/s, and most reasonably good current SSDs have read/write rates around ~500MB/s with reads generally being a bit faster. However, as far as SSDs go, latency is almost everything - even if you had a HDD and a SSD capped at the same read/write rates, the SSD would still beat the HD in things like application/system loading time by a good margin simply because the seek times are essentially eliminated. The maximum sustained read/write rates only really provide accurate performance figures when copying/moving large files - for everything else, latency is more important.


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## claptonman

lostsoul62 said:


> A SATA 3 hard drive is rated at 6 gb/s which is in therory. A SSD is rated at 6 gb/s so how is that 10 times faster?
> I took a look at some other sites and posts and it's partly about access time and so forth so I think I'm understanding better and will get a 60 Gig SSD for my OS, Thanks



The ten times faster was just an estimate/exaggeration. The difference between them are just so incredibly noticeable, though.


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## larsch

The 6 Gbps is the size of the freeway. The hdd and ssd are cars on that freeway. They have different engines


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