SSD benchmarks and reviews

Published on 2012/01/16 by Igor Levicki

I have noticed that some SSD benchmark and review sites such as thessdreview.com insist on benchmarking SSD performance using compressible data, because that is how their manufacturers are benchmarking them, and that is how they can claim such high performance numbers in some cases.

My advice to everyone looking to buy an SSD is to completely ignore such reviews.

Why?

Because most of the data on your computer nowadays is not compressible.

Apart from simple documents, executable files, and in some rare cases, game resource files, all other data (such as photos, movies, and music) which take up the most of your disk space are incompressible.

This means that your SSD real-life performance will be lower than what those review sites are showing you. If you want an accurate performance results then look for SSD benchmarks and reviews which test with random data, and which include IOMeter results for 4 KB blocks.