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Solid state drives are pretty much common place these days if your purchasing a laptop or personal computer, however, there are still plenty of computers out there still running that are using the older magnetic hard drives. The laptop I’m writing this on at the moment is running a traditional hard disc drive. It’s an older laptop but it works fine still despite maybe having to wait a bit for some applications or the system to start up from being powered off. It’s also running a pretty streamlined Linux distro which helps keep things snappy despite the aging hardware, but I was wondering, how much faster is a cheap SATA SSD compared to a SATA HDD.
To compare I used my desktop computer which has both types of hard drives. I created virtual machines (using Virtualbox) with the exact same hardware allocation except for the hard drive and I installed the exact same Linux operating system on both and made sure it was setup before recording. One was installed on a cheap SATA SSD and the other was installed on a SATA HDD.
I used the recording function in Virtualbox to record the startup to desktop and shutting down of the virtual machines in a very unscientific attempt to compare the speed of the drives and how this might impact the performance of a older laptop like this if it had an SSD instead of a HDD.
