SSD Speeds: Faster Reads or equal?

Looking at the benchmarks of the two leading SSDs on today's market, Samsung 840 Pro and the Vector, I notice something odd between them. Samsung had faster reads than writes. While the Vector had roughly equal write/read throughput.

Write
467.3MB/s: Samsung 840 Pro
490.5MB/s: OCZ Vector

Read
515.3MB/s: Samsung 840 Pro
497.0MB/s: OCZ Vector

Benchmark used is Blackmagicdesign's Disk Speed Test.

My guess is that this was purposely done. For reasons I do not know and would like to know through your comments below.

 

reading is IMO much more important than writing. You really notice the difference in reading speeds when booting up your computer, starting up a program or loading a game. While you will only see a difference in writing when you install a new program. So in this case i´d rather grab the samsung than the OCZ

 

At that level of speed, I'd recommend you compare warranty coverage / stability / price, etc. If they're as close in IOPS performance as they are in throughput, there's no point picking one over the other based on performance.

 

so then... Samsung it is

IMO, random access is even more inportant in a SSD, and that's about the same fore most SSDs anyway.

 

You forgot the most important of them all: 4Ks and 512K (and everything between)

Vector 256GB:


Samsung 840 PRO 256GB:

 

I think I'll go with the Samsung because of power consumption. Thanks for the help guys I guess faster reads is better.

 

Run microsfts diskmon to see where 80% of your daily disk access is.

It's as Cloudfire states above.

From a thessdreview guide:
Top 5 Most Frequent Drive Accesses by Type and Percentage:

-4 Read (8%)
-4K Write (58%)
-512b Write (5%)
-8k Write (6%)
-32k Read (5%)

Top 5 account for: 80% of total drive access over test period

Largest access size in top 50:256K Read (-1% of total)

Using Microsofts Diskmon, I simply monitored my typical computer usage in doing things such as using the internet, running applications, playing music etc. In short, I did my best to recreate the computer use of a typical user and then used the program to break down the percentage that specific disk transfer speeds were being utilized. The above results were calculated through a ten minute test period during which results were supplied throughout the test. This is a simple test that anyone could recreate once they have DiskMon for Windows.

How your drive does with real world apps can be seen in reviews that include Vantage HD Suite.

The Corsair Neutron SSDs do equally as well with compressible and incompressible data.

A lot of reviews are done on SSDs that have no data on them and are benchmarked from another drive in the PC while it's in safe mode.

Some reviewers reviews look like cloned reviews of other SSDs on the site.

Some sites shy away fromgiving an SSDs a bad review in fear of making the manufacturer unhappy.

These reviews are useless IMO.

I want to know how the drive does when it's running as the primary boot drive and it's about half full.

Very few professional reviews of SSDs are done on popular gaming notebooks.

Which SSD reviews/reviewer do you like and trust the most?

 

Forgive me but tilleroftheearth is more knowledgeable in this area since this is his pet specialty
The samsung 840pro has much higher 4k random read so your system would definitely feel snappier and a massive improvement in Windows boot times.
However, this is only one aspect of SSD performance. When you have mixed workloads or multiple concurrent IO requests, the SSDs start differentiating in their consistency. SSDs with low latency will be snappy regardless of IO loads or queues with extremely predictable performance, highly inconsistent SSDs will have more latency spikes even though they may have higher peak performance.
if you check this out: AnandTech - Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs
The Samsung drive it is not very consistent with its performance as the IO queues ramp up, therefore you are more likely to hit latency spikes. The Vector drive might not have the higher peak performance but it can sustain its speed better and is much more consistent. The Corsair Neutron GTX is even better with a very tight latency band while the new Intel enterprise drive trumps all the rest.
I.e. it boils down to do you want a very bursty fast SSD (Samsung) or a very consistent not quite as burst fast (Vector or Neutron GTX)