 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. So how fast is a hard drive compared to an SSD? I mean you can go read a spec sheet or look at the charts and graphs on fantastic sites like StorageReview, but if you look carefully, there's something you'll notice about the way that SSDs and hard drives always get compared to each other. It always starts with the reviewer loading up a fresh OS, putting on all the latest drivers, and installing only the applications that are needed for benchmarking. So what we're seeing is the best case scenario for any device. But that's not the way that people actually use their computers. They get malware and remove it, they install programs and uninstall them, but that leaves remnants, they upgrade their hardware and the older driver junk is left over, and they have random crap running in the background that they don't even remember the purpose of. So while a sanitized, scientific approach is the best way to objectively measure the performance of the hardware, what it isn't is a way to represent to people what the real difference in performance between a hard drive and an SSD might look like two, three, or however many years down the road when the hard drive is going to be really struggling to keep up with all that clutter, something that SSDs handle much, much better. So Luke and I sat down and devised a test to show the other end of the spectrum, the worst case scenario for both devices, for science. In the hard drive corner, we've got a Seagate Barracuda 1TB that has had this Windows 7 operating system, more on that later, running on it for almost five years. Representing SSDs, we've got the Corsair Neutron 512. We went with this drive because we feel like it represents a good balance between price, performance, and capacity, something that we need because our hard drive was about half full to begin the test and we wanted to be able to clone everything over there, which leads us into the methodology. That Windows 7 install is one broken piece of poo. It's running in IDE mode, it has undergone several platform changes between originally being installed on N4-6 and the X79 bench that we're using today. It's dual booted with four to five Linux distros with a variety of bootloaders used throughout it, and a triple boot setup with Linux and OS X attempted at one point, and it's run every generation of Nvidia graphics cards from the 8800 series to the 7000 series. And the objective of all of this is to determine once and for all, is there more to the SSD performance story than boot times on a fresh OS? Can an SSD actually justify its much higher cost to storage ratio, even for affordable ones like this one, in a worst case scenario torture test? Have all of those people who upgraded just been deluding themselves about how much better things were when they cloned their old OS to a new SSD? To find out what kind of difference a hard drive user might observe in the real world, this is what we did. Take it away Luke. To elaborate on what Linus was talking about, this operating system has been through kind of a lot. It wasn't just a test drive, this was actually my daily driver for a long time, and because of that I've done registry edits like crazy, I've played with boot animations, I've dual booted it beside everything under the sun, it's gone through every series of Nvidia card, and a lot of AMD ones since 8000 series Nvidia. It started on N46, and I've tried a whole bunch of different platforms on AMD and Intel sides since then. Yeah, it sat at the top of my mineral oil rig, I've had it since high school, it's been through basically everything as far as I can remember, and we're going to see how it fares. So the first thing I did was I booted it up on the X79 platform. I ran Windows Update for a while, which took freaking forever. I downloaded and installed all the latest drivers and necessary benchmarking software that I needed. I then cloned the drive over to the SSD. With both drives running the same Frankenstein absolutely crap, worst as possible scenario operating system, the only thing left was to see the performance difference between the hardware in this kind of torture test scenario. Our first benchmark is going to be based around restarting, so I click the restart button and instantly start timing at that point, and then we time it until it gets all the way through reboot and is able to open PCMark 8. Modern OSs are optimized for hard drives, hybrid drives, SSDs, whatever in terms of booting, and that's why your new PC boots up so quickly. That didn't really help here a ton, as you'll see. Our next test was to uninstall a program. I chose OpenOffice for this, and the objective was to see how long it takes to uninstall this program while using the computer in the background. So while I was running this, I was opening Control Panel, looking at different things, and just random web browsing on linus-tectives.com. About every 5-ish seconds I would do a new action. That was about it, and it took a really long time for the hard drive to uninstall that program. Last off, I tried to run PCMark 8, and it ran fine on the SSD, but it crashed on the hard drive. I really don't think that's PCMark 8's problem. The hard drive probably just screwed up, to be completely honest. So we didn't bother including those results, because they're inconclusive. Thank you to FutureMark for providing the code anyways. I'm sure if my hard drive wasn't as screwed up, it would probably work just fine. So instead of running that test, what I did was I made it calculate all the folders within my C drive to see how long that took, and that was, again, kind of a fairly hilarious result. Alright guys, I hope you liked this kind of odd, weird, contrasty situation. We just kind of noticed that I had this hard drive since forever, and just wanted to kind of see what we could do with it. So I hope you guys liked that. If you did like it, like the video and subscribe. If you didn't like it, dislike the video and subscribe anyways. We'll make something you like eventually. Comment on them down below if you think it was an interesting test, and if you want to comment in a more high-brow section of the internet, you can comment over at linus-tectives.com and let us know what you think over there. 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