SSDHDD
Solid State Drive / Hard Disk Drive comparison
I have older Western Digital 1 terabyte SATA hard disk drives (5 inch WD10EZEX) in some tower PCs, running ancient CENTOS Linux. Those drives will be replaced with Samsung 1 terabyte SATA solid state drives (3 inch 870 EVO) running Debian 12 Bookworm, probably upgraded to Debian 13 Trixie in late 2025.
Here's a rough comparison between the two drives:
1 TB |
WD10EZEZ |
870EVO |
inches |
5.7x4.0x1.0 |
4.0x2.8x0.3 |
weight |
450g |
46g |
rpm |
7200 rpm |
na |
read |
≤ 150 MB/s |
560 MB/s |
write |
≤ 150 MB/s |
530 MB/s |
seek avg/max |
9ms / 21ms |
na |
idle power |
6W |
0.03W |
active power |
12W |
2.5W |
start power |
25W |
na |
MTBF |
0.6 Mhour |
1.5 Mhour |
price 2025/01 |
$40-$60 |
$80-$100 |
largest drives available, early 2025 |
||
|
Western D. |
Nimbus SSD |
|
EXOS |
EDDCT100 |
capacity |
32 TB |
100 TB |
price |
$869 |
$40000 |
The Samsung 870 EVO 4TB SSD is $298. My work tasks don't need that much storage. My rsync/dirvish backups need more.
https://diskprices.com and https://nimbusdata.com
My experience - the much faster speed of SSD helps me get more done. Debian boot-to-prompt is less than 10 seconds, shutdown is 1 second. I hope to arrange 10 second "suspend-with-reminders", so I can power down machines for short breaks, without interrupting workflow.