128 KB Sequential Performance
SSD manufacturers often want to stress random performance because they quite obviously decimate hard drives. Sequential accesses are still important to examine, however, because they represent a majority of an average desktop's operations.
The 512 GB m4 reigns king in our sequential read measurement.
As in random reads, the native 4 KB page size continues to give the 128 GB m4 a lead over its 256 GB big brother. But overall, the effect of capacity is much smaller than what we saw in random performance. The 64 GB m4 still achieves 205 MB/s. That's only 35% less than the 512 GB's 277.1 MB/s.
Sequential writes matter more when you're dealing with large files, like your movie library. Here, the 256 GB m4 performs just as well as the 512 GB m4.
Of course, if you're shopping for SSDs with a capacity less than 256 GB, you should expect less performance. The 128 GB m4 performs about 40% slower than its 256 and 512 GB brothers. If you cut capacity down to 64 GB, the m4 delivers a measly 23.9 MB/s. That's one-sixth the performance of the 128 GB m4 and one-tenth of the higher-capacity m4s.
In this case, Seagate's hard drive delivers better sequential write performance than the 64 GB m4.
