HDD or SSD for VMDKs (vmware)

It is not installed yet, but I have a 1 TB WD Velociraptor (10k) drive. I've been reading about the Crucial M500 960 GB SSD. Very tempting with its price. So, benefits between going from what I have to this drive?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148696

So, yes, I do need this fast storage, since I'll be running multiple VMs for a test environment. Hence the amount of ram I have installed on this computer.

 

Well, WD don't give R/W specs on their website (that i've been able to find), so I'm going out on a limb when I say that the SSD is likely to be much faster than the spinning rust any day. The SSD can perform better than the mechanical drive consistently as it can operate at "full speed" where a mechanical drive couldn't due to head positioning requirements and waiting for the right sector to spin around. I know this is reduced with a 10K drive but it can't beat an SSD.

The other side of this is that you already have the 10K drive, and for 80-90% of applications you won't notice the time difference. Also, the SSD will wear out faster, even though this aspect of SSDs has been improved since they went mass-market. Also, in the event of drive failure, it is much easier to recover data from a mechanical drive as you can swap out controller boards, or move the platters to another enclosure, whereas with an SSD the data is basically gone.

Plus SSDs are still more expensive.

The decision must be yours, but personally I would stick with the 10K drive.

 

SSDs may not wear out as fast as we have been led to believe, here's a Samsung that's had 195+TiB written to it - and counting: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/417...espan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-update (my M4 has only written ~7TiB in 14 months).

Still a lot of money though, will the drive be for OS as well as VM's?

 

What do you use to find out how much data (write) there is on an ssd?

 

Hard Disk Sentinel, as used in the video of that stress test. It needs to be running full time to log much of the data, except for that self-reported via SMART.

My logged usage is a little over 4GB but there were several short spells and one longer period when I didn't have it running, so I guesstimated my total usage.

 

ah, so it can't run after the fact. Okay. Thanks, though.