SSD Intel 530 speeds

Not sure why you're running into the speed issues - your computer has SATA III (6Gbps), although I don't have much experience with that drive. If you return it, get the 840 Evo or 840 Pro - you'll get much faster read/write on it.

I'm getting about 480-500Mbps for both reads and writes on a mid-2012 13" with an 840 Evo as a reference...

 

When you say that you are getting these disappointing speeds, is the real world performance suffering or are you running some benchmark program and not getting the numbers that you expect to see?

Several things to consider here:

1. SSD makers are moving to 20nm NAND and more NAND pages per chip. For smaller SSDs there are a smaller number of chips per SSD and a smaller number of parallel paths for read/write. This means the small drives are often slower than the larger drives in the same line of SSDs. In 2014, 120GB is considered to be a small SSD.

2. Perhaps you are using a SSD Benchmark Program (let me guess, the one from Blackmagic design?) that uses compressed data to measure performance. Some drives (like the 530) are using a Sandforce Controller that takes advantage of data compression. If most of your data is text, html, source code, bitmaps or other data that can be easily compressed, the real world performance might be better than the test results. If on the other hand, most of your data is mpeg video, jpeg or other files that are already compressed, then testing with compressed data is a more valid test. But it is possible that Intel uses some mixed data model for testing. Perhaps their site has some info on this, or you can ask on their forums:
https://communities.intel.com/community/tech/solidstate

3. In most cases, small file read/write performance is more important than sequential read/write speeds. But most people use the most common speed test available which measures sequential read/write speeds, so often these benchmarks are quite meaningless.

Most likely you will never notice a difference outside of benchmarking. You could be losing some bragging rights, but very little else. If you wish to replace the Intel 530 with a 'faster' one, it might be good to check the SSD data sheet carefully and perhaps get a larger capacity SSD of at least 240GB or 480GB if these are faster.

Similar thread here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1682264

 

The first reply from ecschwarz covers this, but the original 840 in the 120GB size would not have faster write speeds than the drive that you have now.

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_review_tlc

120GB (MZ-7TD120BW)
* Sequential READ: up to 530 MB/s
* Sequential 128KB WRITE: up to 130 MB/s