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Not everything can be shown in a benchmark
Benchmarks are a good measure of speed given the programs test parameters but they don’t tell the entire story. They tout speeds measured and IOPS as raw data but don’t give you a real-life insight.
Running a mechanical drive still is a very real thing and people boot off of them and run them with little to no knowledge of its performance characteristics or how it could be much better. Even modern HDD’s with all of the improvements they have made simply can not make up for the access time/seek time differences you get from a flash-based storage solution. Mechanical media is still a very viable media even for enthusiast systems for large amounts of cold data, but I have experienced scenarios where systems will have pauses or delays if the HDD enters a low power state from sitting idle and Windows Explorer, for instance, can take several seconds to react. This is due to the drive spinning up and coming online basically.
This is likely a first world problem but it is perceptible to me and while I very well may be a niche power user, this just goes to show that Flash memory is life changing as even systems with fast SSD main drives with a cold storage mechanical volume can really break the experience for me and make it hard to work on consistently or at the very least it can be quite annoying.
As prices for new SSD’s come into the same price per GB range I believe Mechanical storage will head the way of the tape drive and floppy drives as it simply has fewer failure points, no moving parts and is much less prone to failure from vibration or impact.
