Comparison of SSD vs. HDD disks

2012-12-16

Comparison of SSD vs. HDD disks

SSD disk: Corsair Extreme Edition 32 GB (X32)

HDD: Samsung HD403LJ 500 GB

JBoss AS: 6.0 trunk – r96748

JBoss AS compilation – Windows XP 64-bit

Average compilation times

Everything on SSD, formated as NTFS: 2:20
Everything on the first half of HDD: 2:40

It's a draw.

Additional tests:
Working copy on SSD, formated as Ext3, used as Ext2 via Ext2 IFS: 3:47
Working copy on SSD, formated as NTFS: 2:16
Everything on HDD, WC on the end of the disk: 2:37

* Everything means JDK, Maven, Maven repository and the working copy.

<localRepository>/mnt/x32/data/.m2/repository</localRepository>
export JAVA_HOME=/mnt/x32/sw/java/jdk/1.6.0_14
export M2_HOME=/mnt/x32/sw/tools/maven/2.2.1

JBoss AS compilation – Linux 2.6 32-bit

Completely on SSD: 3:14
Completely on HDD: 3:16

It's a draw.

Zip and Unzip – Linux 2.6 32-bit

$ date; zip -R -1 AS.zip AS-svn-trunk > /dev/null; date

  Zip* Unzip
SSD 0:20 0:44
HDD 3:55 1:47

SSD totally wins.

Zip and Unzip with WinRAR – Windows XP

  Zip* Unzip
SSD 0:40 1:30
HDD 6:23 2:10

SSD totally wins.

* Not counting the initial directory structure scan, which was quick on SSD and took ages on HDD anyway.

Machine specification

MBo: Asus P5N-E SLI – nForce 650i
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo
RAM: Kingmax 2× 2 GB DDR2, dual channel

Reproduction steps

Edit (or create) your ~/.m2/settings.xml – add or edit <localRepository> under the root element:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">


  <localRepository>/mnt/x32/data/.m2/repository</localRepository>

</settings>

Move Java and Maven binaries to the respective partition and edit your environment variables to point to them. If you build using build.sh or build.bat, Maven from AS-trunk/tools/maven is used.

export JAVA_HOME=/mnt/x32/sw/java/jdk/1.6.0_14
export M2_HOME=/mnt/x32/sw/tools/maven/2.2.1
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$M2_HOME/bin:$PATH
svn co -r 96748 http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbossas/trunk AS-trunk
cd AS-trunk
build.sh
date; build.sh clean; build.sh date
cd ..
date; zip -R -1 AS.zip AS-svn-trunk > /dev/null; date
date; unzip AS.zip -d test > /dev/null; date

SiSoft Sandra 2003 score

NTFS.

Ext2 via Ext2 IFS.

HDD used for tests.

Referential ramdisk benchmark

ddr667, dualchan
4x2,4G xeon

$ build.sh
real    1m36.857s
user    1m22.204s
sys     0m36.796s


$ time tar cf ~/download/shm-jboss-test.tar *
real    0m8.720s
user    0m1.196s
sys     0m2.893s

Thanks to Daniel.

Notes – old win values

M2_HOME c:\sw\Java\apache-maven-2.0.9

JAVA_HOME c:\sw\Java\jdk1­.6.0_16–32bit

JDK_HOME c:\sw\Java\jdk1­.6.0_16–64bit

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