SSD Latency benchmark. Why is it important vs real life benchmark?

irlwizard

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Sep 9, 2011
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I just read a full Samsung 950 Pro SSD review as seen below:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-ssd,4313-5.html

Samsung is winning all the 'PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance' benchmarks by a few fractional seconds over Intel SSD 750 400GB PCIe..

But the Intel SSD is WAAAY better than Samsung at latencies. How important are latencies, the review says latencies is arguably the most important factor but why? Especially when the Intel SSD loses on real life applications.

QuickEdit: Reason for the post above is that I'm looking at buying either a 500GB Samsung 950 Pro, raiding 0 two 250GB or get the Intel 750 (on discount). Not sure what would be best for my needs, random reads or low latency. The build would be for a workstation with some games.

Please only reply if you know the answer, not THINK you know it, there is too much false information on the internet, thank you in advance.
 

b-man542

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The key point about latency from the review from my understanding is how the SSD's is the garbage collection and wear-leveling utilize the controller's resources. Higher latency means a slower response time from the drive as its busy doing its garbage collection and wear-leveling routines. As for real world performance garbage collection is the only main factor other than it getting old. Garbage collection is a form of deleting already deleted files from the disk so the blocks can be rewritten to. Garbage collection is a slow operation so while the disk is deleting files it will slow the responses for other operations. So more tabs means more disk cache which means more deleting operations which can impact performance.
 

irlwizard

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I thought SSDs did garbage collection and all that stuf when the computer is idle anyway and isn't this only relevant to overall performance if your storage drive is close to FULL capacity?

With that said, if they want to test for how good the garbage collection is, why don't they run a different TRIM type benchmark, anandtech and hardware cannucks used to do it but now they seem to have gotten lazy. Hardwarecanucks is still the best storage reviewer because they show how the drive works at different capacity levels. All these synthetic bullshit benchmarks piss me off...

Plus Samsung offers 10yr warranty, so to say that is has worse garage collection than Intel just because of the latency is probably false. Intel would also offer 10yrs if they knew they had a better product.