Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up

Benchmark Results: Access Time

All flash-based products show very short access times, but read access times are slightly longer on SandForce-powered SSDs because they lack a DRAM cache memory that could help accellerate data access. However, the differences are hardly notable in everyday operation, even on write performance. Keep in mind that the charts show microseconds, and 1000 microseconds equal one millisecond (ms). Typical hard drives have between 5 and 20 ms read access time and require about 10x to 500x longer access times than SSDs.