SSD write advertized speeds... what?

[Veraster]

I've been looking at SSDs. Between Intel, Samsung, Crucial and OCZ I've noticed that the data write speeds for Intel SSDs beat the living crap out of almost every one else's SSDs for the same price.
For instance, Samsung's mid-priced SSDs have advertized write speeds of 130-320MB/S. They have a $400 256GB SSD that can write at 520MB/S but that's 2X as expensive as Intel's 256GB SSD that can write almost as fast for almost half the price.
OCZ SSDs aren't that as bad on paper as Samsung's. For the same price as Intel's 120GB SSDs they write at about 300MB/S.
Cricual M4 SSDs (mostly looking at the 128GB ones) write data at a rate of 175MB/S. Even their most expensive SSDs aren't even close to the speed of Intel SSDs. You could go faster than that for cheaper and have more space with HDDs in RAID 0.
Most Intel SSDs don't go slower than 450MB/S on the write speed. There are a few listed on newegg with really crappy write speeds. Why do those even exist especially since they're the same price as the fast ones? There shouldn't be any practical reason to buy one of those slow SSDs. Spending all that money on an SSD almost as slow as an HDD is like putting a screen door on a submarine.

Why do Intel SSDs seem to be way better than everyone else's on paper? Is there something I don't know about that Samsung, OCZ, and Crucial SSD customers do? I don't own an SSD and I've never used one because I'm waiting for them to make one that doesn't have a "write limit". I don't want to have to buy new SSDs and reinstall a perfectly good copy of Windows every year or two.

 

[PP Mguire]

I'll say this to start off with, every device has a "write limit", it's called when it dies. Given the assumption you treat your gear properly an SSD should last as long as any normal HDD. The first gens were supposed to die quickly due to this "write" nonsense, but last time I checked the guy who has mine says it still works without speed loss.

I'll follow that up with, no, a RAID 0 setup wont match the quickness of an SSD in HDD form because access/seek times and overall latency is so much lower as well as IOPS. You might be able to beat out 175MB/s write in raw speed but then again you have to realize the specs you are looking at are sequential. They aren't sustained speeds.

Now I'll say this, Intel had some of the slowest SSDs next to Crucial until their latest batch of releases. Even still, I'll use these 2 as an example of what I meant up there ^^ in SSD form.

Newegg.com - Intel 330 Series Maple Crest SSDSC2CT060A3K5 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC064D/AM 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Desktop Upgrade Kit

The Samsung is 10 dollars more with sale price, but initial pricing is the same. Take a look at specs, the Samsung has 4GB more than the Intel but slower sequential write. Well, on any drive we want to reduce the amount of writes so we look at read speeds which is what you do 90% of the time. Sequential read is higher on the Samsung but look at the IOPS difference. I guarantee you'll actually "feel" faster on the Samsung every day rather than having a faster write speed on the Intel. Not to mention before sale price they are the same and the Samsung is actually bigger. The same can probably be said for probably any Intel SSD (I'm not going to compare all specs) besides maybe the 520. Even still from what I've seen IOPS on the 520 series still is around the 20k mark. It makes a huge difference and you want IOPS to be as high as you can get which is why OCZ were making Max IOPS versions of their SSDs.