Understanding SSD Advertised Performance

If you are considering the purchase of a SSD any time in the near future, read this as it will probably be the single most important thing you ever learn about solid state drives.

If you have just purchased an SSD, you are going to want to sit down and grab a coffee before proceeding further.

If you are a manufacturer, please don’t read this as we are about to expose the biggest fallacy of SSD sales today.

We are not exaggerating when we state that this is probably going to be the single most piece of information you will ever learn about solid state drives. And no… we are NOT discussing MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) and the SSD life expectancy as plainly described on every SSD package. That’s for another day.

This article deals strictly with the visible performance seen between SSDs and, although not as key as it was a few years back when we wrote its first revision, its importance cannot be understated. In fact, an understanding of this will enable one to easily understand why SSDs are just that much faster than the hard drive.

THE SSD MANUFACTURERS BLUFF

Understanding SSD Advertised Performance and Its Purchase Implications - An SSD Primer - The SSD Review

 

This information in particular is probably the most pertinent from the entire article, and people with tech knowledge should actually be able to come to the same conclusion as the article:

Top 5 Most Frequent Drive Accesses by Type and Percentage:

-8K Read (7.60%)
-8K Write (56.35%)
-1K Write (6.10%)
-16 Write (5.79%)
-64K Read (2.49%)

Top 5 account for: 78.33% of total drive access over test period

Largest access size in top 50: 256K Read (0.44% of total)

I already knew all of that actually, but a good read for those who need more info before they purchase an SSD.

 

Yup, and to think local people I know who claim to be knowledgeable think I'm crazy when I tell them the most important thing to me is 4k reads/writes.

"Are all the files you work with 4K?" they all say... sigh

 

is there any workload where 4K performance ISN'T significant?

if so, I would just buy raided hard drives....

 

This had the right timing for me.
I just bought a high end gaming laptop with a hybrid drive im very unimpressed with so im gonna swap it out to SSD.
If i ever had known in the past the importance of 4k R/W's ive forgotten it, But it will go with me now as i research the right drive for me.

After some research using the 4k read/write importance i feel the Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD will be what i buy.
I had this drive picked out previously due to the reviews, But i didn't have the facts in a way i understood as to why it was so much better than most other drives.

 

This is nothing new iirc.

Results varies depends on user behavior.

The improvement is from HDD to SSD. Not SSD to a faster SSD.

Yes, it is a selling bluff (so does all other tech stuff ), but our economy is built upon this.

Edit: While i reading the article and followed the link for disk mon, I stumble upon this

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558

BEST SCREENSAVER EVER !