External Solid State Drives

How does the performance of an external SSD drive compare to an internal?

I'm assuming the connection would be USB 2.0 - would that be the limiting factor in speed? Is it a waste of money?

EDIT - To Clarify; what I really want to do is to decrease build time in Visual Studio. I've been told that SSD is the answer to all my problems; but it's a work machine and I'm not sure of the internals and I'd prefer not to have to crack it open.

I currently have a ST3250310AS Barracuda drive.

Also - how do flash drives compare to SSD?

Solution 1:

We have easily updated some Lenovo Thinkpad T61P and Dell Precision M4400 at work with an internal SSD. In both case you just need a screwdriver and in 5 minutes you can substitute your HDD.

I can say that the performance are stunning compared to the previous disk. The boot is really fast and also the launch time Visual Studio 2008, SQL Management Tools and office applications like Lotus Notes, Word, Excel is reduced.

I did some benchmark on build times, but we don't have a big project with thousand files, only many small projects with hundred of files. In any case I measured a performance increase by 25%.

I did some benchmark on some queries on a local database and in this case I found an increase of 50%.

Pay attention that with XP the performance with SSD decreased in time, you need to wipe the cell with a program from the manufacturer, time to time.

Buying an SSD for external USB 2.0 drive is a waste of money. With USB 3.0 things are going to be interesting.

Solution 2:

Yes and no.

SSD over USB 2.0 is a waste. With SSDs capable of pushing up to 200MB/sec and beyond, why limit them to USB which can't push more than 30MB/sec in the real world? http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-firewire-esata,2534-5.html

If you're going to spend the money on a SSD, get it installed internally. Then drop your old internal drive into an inexpensive enclosure and use it for backup or aux storage.

However, it must also be said that much of the "real world" benefit of SSDs comes from their decreased latency and excellent performance on small, random file accesses -- which is what your OS and applications are doing most of the time. And that kind of file access will not be bumping against the 30MB/sec limits of USB 2.0.

Sequential throughput speeds (those gaudy 200MB/sec numbers) are only seen when you're reading or writing large files.

Here's what Joel Sposky wrote about SSD's impact on his team's software build performance. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html In a nutshell, it didn't speed up their build times. However it does make everything launch more quickly and feel more responsive and from personal experience I can tell you this will make you a bit more productive (or at least less frustrated :P)