Re:SSD Storage: 2018 in review
by lorenzhs on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @10:01AM
(#18911535)
Modern HDDs easily go beyond 110MB/s, but nonetheless stay well below 200MB/s afaik. It'll probably be somewhere in between. Otherwise your figures are fairly correct, if not on the conservative side for NVMe drives (a Samsung 970 Pro will sustain sequential speeds above 3GB/s read and 2GB/s write).
But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.
But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.