Maximum PC

So I'm wanting to get another SSD, but I've noticed a couple things.

First, the latest generation of OCZ SSDs (Vertex 4 & Agility 4) have lower sequential read/write speeds than the previous generation (Vertex 3 & Agility 3).

Second, MaxPC recently posted two articles (Samsung 840 SSDs & RunCore's Kylin III) where they primarily refer to the IOPs.

For everyday use, to which one should I pay attention?

Feel free to take the poll, leave a post, or both! Thanks!

It depends on the operation you're primarily concerned about. Are you doing large transfers? Then obviously speed is most important. Are you doing a lot of random activity such as file serving? Then IOPS are more important.

Conversely, how often do you transfer thousands of 4K files???

RE thread title / OP: First thing to realize is that all SSD manufacturers rate their read/write speeds based on Atto benchmark best transfer rate. However Atto has no bearing upon real-world performance. This is why Vertex 3 can show numbers like 500/550MB/sec while the Vertex 4 only shows 475/535MB/sec. Yet in real-world performance, the Vertex 4 (since firmware version 1.4 - currently at 1.5 which has been included on new drives for several months) is up to 30% faster, Crystal Disk Mark & AS-SSD are both much better at corelating an artificial benchmark data into real-world performance numbers.

Second thing to realize is that IOPS doesn't mean much for the average user either. Most mechanical hard drives can't even touch 1,000 IOPS, yet for 99% of home users, mechanical drives provide more IOPS than they can ever use. IOPS is usefull mainly for large servers where multiple requests for data may occur simultaneously.

The only useful metric in determining SSD performance is online reviews from trusted sources.

Beyond that, you have to look more deeply into the details of each SSD, stuff like, what controller does it use, what brand of NAND is used, what type of NAND is used (Toggle, Asynchronous, Synchronous, etc...), SLC, MLC, or TLC, speed of the NAND, etc... etc... etc...

Unfortunately, the only review website that I came across that actually does something as close to a comprehensive real-world stress test is Anandtech. Everyone else seems to use benchmark tools.

Like let's take this snippet of the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB review. Under heavy workload conditions, it averages at 154MB/s reads, 389MB/s writes. Huh. That's a far cry from the marketed 540MB/s reads (then again, it probably wasn't sequential either... which your data is never really going to be).

Thank you, all, for the input.

I thought OCZ's switch from Sandforce to Indilinx caused a slight decrease in speeds for the 4 series model, but it would improve in the following series - I guess that could be inaccurate. This is really interesting!

Are there other benchmarks that mimic real-world conditions better?