Quote:
Originally Posted by
bobby2478 
No, I said the metrics you posted DO make sense, they just don't show the 330. The problem is OTHER reviews I've read specific to the 330 compare things that sound greek to me. For example:
- 4kb Random Performance
- 128kb Sequential Performance
- Incompressible Performance
- Storage Suite v1 and PCMark 7
- 2mb Sequential Transfer read/write
- 2mb Random Transfer read/write
- 4k aligned read/write
- 4k write latency
That was after you edited your post.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter that the Intel 330 isn't included in that line-up. You can just follow the trends - which is basically it doesn't matter which SSD you get or if you're using SATA 2 or SATA 3, they all perform around the same with normal usage. The reason why review sites don't bother posting more "practical" benchmarks is because there's practically no difference between various SSDs with normal usage. Speed of SSDs far exceed most single users' ability to tax them.
As for the various metrics, sequential read/write basically tells you how fast the SSD can do large file transfers (e.g. ISO files, etc). Random 4K performance and latency is primarily what affects operating system and application performance (of course, it also depends on the specific application).
To put things in perspective, I'll use
Storage Reviews' "Real-World" Benchmarks from their
Intel 330 review.
Quote:
For the average user, trying to translate random 4K write speeds into an everyday situation is pretty difficult. It helps when comparing drives in every setting possible, but it doesn't exactly work out into faster everyday usage or better game loading times. For this reason we turned to our StorageMark 2010 traces, which include HTPC, Productivity, and Gaming traces to help readers find out how a drive might rank under their conditions.
The first real-life test is our HTPC scenario.
In this test we include: playing one 720P HD movie in Media Player Classic, one 480P SD movie playing in VLC, three movies downloading simultaneously through iTunes, and one 1080i HDTV stream being recorded through Windows Media Center over a 15 minute period. Higher IOps and MB/s rates with lower latency times are preferred. In this trace we recorded 2,986MB being written to the drive and 1,924MB being read.
2,986MB writes and 1,924MB reads gives us a total of 4,910MB over a 15 minute span. Assuming you're able to fast forward through time, then drives are able to finish each task in the following amount of time:
Intel 520 240GB: 10.91 seconds
Intel 330 120GB: 13.34 seconds
Intel 320 300GB: 32.30 seconds
Unfortunately, unless you're in possession of super powers, this task will still take 15 minutes regardless of which drive you use. In fact, for this usage scenario, I reckon even an HDD will suffice.
Quote:
Our second real-life test covers disk activity in a productivity scenario. For all intents and purposes this test shows drive performance under normal daily activity for most users.
This test includes: a three hour period operating in an office productivity environment with 32-bit Vista running Outlook 2007 connected to an Exchange server, web browsing using Chrome and IE8, editing files within Office 2007, viewing PDFs in Adobe Reader, and an hour of local music playback with two hours of additional online music via Pandora. In this trace we recorded 4,830MB being written to the drive and 2,758MB being read.
4,830MB writes and 2,758MB reads for a total of 7,588MB over a 3 hour span. We'll do the same calculations as above.
Intel 520 240GB: 22.12 seconds
Intel 330 120GB: 32.99 seconds
Intel 320 300GB: 50.25 seconds
Good news if you happen to be The Flash or Superman, the above means you can finish what you're doing in as little as 22.12 seconds if you get the Intel 520 240GB. If you're among us mere mortals, again, does it matter? At most, you'll be shaving a second here, a couple of seconds there. If you get an SSD, all it means is the computer will be waiting for you instead of you waiting for the computer.
