Gadgetory

truth in advertising whether it's the tact on resort fees from your last vegas vacation or that photo of the big mac that looks nothing like the burger you'll be eating the corporations are always finding new misleading ways to market their products and this is no less true in the tech world especially when it comes to SSDs so Sabourin sponsored this video demystifying some of the SSD marketing that's out there now don't get me wrong when companies claim that SSDs are faster than traditional hard drives they are definitely right about that the issue is that typically the numbers on the spec sheet or the advertisement from the manufacturer while very impressive sounding and big in many cases seem to be designed only to make their drive sound incredibly fast now in this video we discussed which specs to pay the most attention to when shopping for an SSD for example an SSD will be able to read or write large sequential files something like a space hogging video file more quickly than lots of small more random bits of data like you would encounter with frequently used programs like web browsers meaning that the random performance specs are more relevant to the everyday user than the sequential ones but here's the rub there isn't any kind of body or industry association that oversees SSD testing and while SSDs work very differently compared to mechanical hard drives and even compared to each other in many cases oftentimes the exact same tests are used on hard drives and SSDs you see most quick and dirty drive benchmarks measure how long it takes for a drive to accomplish some task say transferring a large file but this kind of work is a lot more straightforward for a hard drive because fragmentation aside it can simply overwrite whatever space on the platter is marked as free SSDs on the other hand often need to erase the data first and move some existing data before new data can be written to a specific block you can learn more about that up here but basically it adds more time to your SSD write operations especially if your SSD is getting full and doesn't have as much free space to work with and while it might not be difficult to measure how long this process takes the issue is that in the real world people aren't writing to mostly empty drives which is what many manufacturers use for their benchmarks instead as your SSD fills up from daily use there's more and more performance overhead due to data reshuffling which can cause real-world speeds to drop off dramatically far below what's listed on the spec sheet then making matters much worse you have the fact that the number of random reads in particular that an SSD can do this is measured in AI ops is often reported while the SSD isn't also trying to write much data and in the real world there are many scenarios where you would be doing both reading and writing at the same time meaning that these read AI ops that are reported on the sheet can easily end up inflated throw in the fact that an increasing number of SSDs employ complex data management and caching algorithms to boost drive performance beyond what should be possible with the underlying flash memory under certain conditions and it can be very unclear exactly what kind of data was used to get the numbers that you see when you go to buy a drive on Amazon or Newegg so then does that mean that SSD manufacturers are all evil and going out of their way to lie to you well actually probably not it's more likely that because proper SSD benchmarking is way more difficult and time-consuming than testing a hard drive manufacturers simply can't be bothered to develop and run these complicated benchmarks versus the quick ones that they do on these mostly empty drives because it not only spits out impressive looking numbers that look great on the spec sheet but it also saves them time and resources and the thing is that so far this is only even bitten a handful of manufacturers in the but because the truth is that many people who buy an SSD just want an easy boost in speed and responsiveness compared to their hard drive and they may not even care about the exact performance numbers but anyway let's say you really are concerned about how a drive stacks up before you buy it well for the discerning buyer we've linked a couple of websites down below that do more comprehensive Drive testing using methods that closely simulate real-world workloads and then drawing conclusions from that so grab those reading glasses and get crackin it takes a bit more effort but this knowledge could come in handy for when you need peak performance for all that super critical work you do speaking of peak performance check out the rocket nvme SSD from our sponsor for today's video Sabourin it uses an N dot 2 interface so that means it's super small not taking up pretty much any room in your computer and it supports PCI Express 3.0 Gen 4 so it's super fast whether you're gaming editing videos or completing projects it also features advanced wear leveling to ensure that it'll be snappy and reliable for a long time to come and you can check it out today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible and don't forget to subscribe right away we do everything as fast as possible why can't you don't put it off that's how you forget