Hard drive vs SSD performance comparison

Out of interest I put my drives through their paces. I found exactly what I expected, though it's interesting to see numbers.

My SSD drives are OWC 3G, not their latest version. My Seagate and Western Digital drives are 1-2 years old.

What I found:
- SSDs have better read throughput than hard drives, though hard drives are only 30-50% behind for reading large chunks of data
- Hard drives have better write throughput than SSDs
- All drives slow down with lots of random reads and writes, but SSDs are about 50
times faster than hard drives
- Larger SSDs are faster than smaller SSDs, presumably because they have more flash chips and can parallelise the data access over them.

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And here's a nice, detailed performance comparison specifically for Lightroom:
http://www.computer-darkroom.com …be-lightroom-performance/

I did a bridge version here.

Yuck! Those benchmarks are pretty slow.

Here's my Intel SSD

Wow, you really hammered your SSD running 5x 1000mb. No need to use such big chunks for testing. The 5x 100mb used above is a better idea.

I'd let your drive idle overnight for a few days for garbage collection to kick in so you can regain some of your write speeds. Oh, and write speeds will depend heavily on whether a particular SSD has saturated all of it's NAND.

I'm assuming the OWC uses a Sandforce controller - they perform poorly with CrystalDiskMark since it uses uncompressible data.

The Intel one does look a bunch faster. I just used the default test, which was 5GB. My SSDs are a generation old, of the Sandforce controller. How old is the Intel one, and how expensive was it?

I very rarely write to my SSDs, other than the page file sitting on one of them, but I have 16GB of RAM so I doubt it's used much.

Do the sandforce controllers compress data before they write them? That'd be a smart thing to do, just a bit more processing power could increase performance a fair bit for some data.

hollis_f wrote in post #13256795
Yuck! Those benchmarks are pretty slow.

Here's my Intel SSD

How fast will your intel ssd be with 1000mb files? It looks like you used 100mb files.

hihohito wrote in post #13260432
How fast will your intel ssd be with 1000mb files? It looks like you used 100mb files.

I just ran a test with 100MB set. Random reads of small blocks was 50% faster, but otherwise not much changed. I don't think that setting makes much difference for SSDs, it'd probably make more difference for hard drives, which have higher latency.

hihohito wrote in post #13260432
How fast will your intel ssd be with 1000mb files? It looks like you used 100mb files.

Those figures aren't file sizes - they're total amounts of data transferred. It makes very little difference to the numbers if one uses 100MB instead of 1000MB - but it does run the test 10 times faster.

And using smaller test blocks will reduce wear on the SSD.

And yes, Sandforce drives compress the data before writing them to the NAND - that's how they're able to have such good write speeds on typical/average compressible data.