Confusing Kingston SSD vs. Sandisk Extreme quickness

[Tenashus1]

This is more anecdotal than anything else.

I have a mid 2009 MBP with 2.26ghz and 4 gb ram. I installed a Kingston HyperX 3k 240 gb SSD, and the computer was speedy although my Blackmagic read/ writes were both in the low 100s. However, it was negotiating at 1.5 and not the expected 3gb rate.

Felt I was missing something with that. So, I install a Sandisk Extreme 240 gb SSD in its place. Great read/ write speeds: 194 to 263. Did the r211m firmware upgrade. Negotiating at 3gb rate. Yet, with all that, both my wife and I noticed that the Kingston ran faster than the Sandisk.

To say that I am puzzled at the observation is to put it mildly. Do all these numbers make a whole lot of difference after all is said and done? By observation they don't appear to at least in my case.

 

[robvas]

To say that I am puzzled at the observation is to put it mildly. Do all these numbers make a whole lot of difference after all is said and done? By observation they don't appear to at least in my case.

BlackMagic is a fine tool but it reports max transfer rate when doing large, sequential transfers. Real-world use of a computer doesn't work that way, it leans heavily towards small, random writes.

To answer your question, peak #'s don't always tell the full story and even so, a drive can win one benchmark and lose others. SSD's are all pretty fast these days and it's probably not a noticeable difference between first place and fifth place.

That said, the Kingston and Sandisk drives you mention are almost the exact same drive - they use a Sandforce controller and have the same amount of storage. So really, they shouldn't perform much different. The firmware is customized by each manufacturer and they might use different brands of NAND memory, but they should all be about the same.

Example: