dmpoole, the VAST majority of computer usage is simply not sequential, nor all highly compressible data. Atto is generally the benchmark of choice when it comes to rating SSD's and normal drives and gives absolute and without question BEST CASE SCENARIO numbers. If any of the drives, even the best ones start selling based on worse case scenario numbers, unless mechnical drives followed suit no one would buy them.
THe problem being, the cheap kingston drive based on the Intel drive is actually a massive amount faster than the performance Kingston which is based on the samsung controller, in WORST case scenario, which comes up far more frequently than best case.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/10 that pretty much sums it up.
In random writes, the "cheap" Kingston is absolutely blowing the performance kingston drive away. The thing is, its when you, for instance are transfering one big file in the background then open a video file and then click to open firefox. A conventional harddrive, at that point, cowers in the corner and causes your system to become incredibly unresponsive. The early SSD's were decent but in those situations also because fairly unresponsive, though their sequential and larger random file usage was superb, it was the small file and multitasking that caused them a problem.
The decent SSD's, I can open 58 different programs and they'd open incredibly quickly, literally minutes faster than they would on a crap ssd(old jmicron ones) or a mechanical hdd.
The problem with all benchmarking and ALL reviews are inconsistant ability to show real world performance and thats just making it even more confusing.
The reality is no one uses hard drives the same, if you have the performance samsung and only use it to transfer large files, then it will outperform the Intel based one, if you play games and multitask a lot, then it will likely be quite a lot slower than the Intel based on regardless of the optimum numbers shown.
If you notice from those reviews, while the Sandforce drives, properly aligned are hugely impressive, random reads are STILL beaten by the Intel drive, and a lot of people won't always been installing and writing stuff, but gaming for instance is some 80% reads, spread between sequential and random. The Intel is still on par to the Sandforce in those situations, the reason its still a wanted drive is it now costs around £170 for a 50GB Sandforce drive, OR a very small amount extra for an 80GB Intel. Its a tad slower in area's, but its 30GB bigger for a very similar cost.
New versions of the Sandforce drives are coming with higher capacity enabled, if current Sandforce drives can be upgraded with firmware is, questionable, its likely, OCZ and co are working on it, but its not certain.
A sandforce with 60gb and being faster than Intel is much better and cheaper per GB than it at 50GB.
If you go back again and look at the worst case scenario for your Kingston drive, in random writes its at 4.4MB, my current raid 0 diamondmax 9's(these are REALLY old) are getting 3MB random 4kb writes, though in the test they are running it would probably get 1.5-2mb's. When you run the drive properly aligned, in random writes your drive is at 5.3MB, the Indilinx drive is at 11mb's, so twice as fast, the Intel drive is at 46mb's, so 9 times as fast, and the new sandforces are like 30 times faster.
As I hinted at earlier, the other problem is benchmarking, if you check the OCZ forums you'll find people who all find that performance as new, and performance 2 weeks later aren't close to the same, still superb, but different.
This other problem is ALL the drives, every single last one drops in performance to some degree after several weeks usage, the biggest problem is, they all drop performance differently to different levels. The Intel maintains its performance fantastically well, jmicron's would suck badly(to start with) and not drop much performance. INdilinx ones drop a lot of performance but gain most of it back with Trim, Sandforce drives don't seem to be getting a lot back with trim, OR Trim commands aren't being passed to the drives properly, its too early to know for sure.
If you use raid, trim won't work in most situations(I believe Intel finally got trim commands to pass through ITS raid controllers but no one elses), raid, several AHCI drivers, they do seem to be rushing drives out without making certain of certain things. But they've also got AMD, Intel, Jmicron, Marvell, highpoint, adaptec and several others, they need to all have working drivers and they need MS to update the OS to support the new drivers and get trim working, it won't happen quickly/perfectly.
TO the OP, a Sandforce or Crucial C300 is the fastest drive you can get at the moment, but both are quite a bit more expensive per GB than the Intel. For under £200 you can get a 50GB sandforce that you MIGHT be able to upgrade to around 58GB in the future, a 60GB Crucial(formatted it will be around 60GB) or a 80GB Intel.
Yet another problem occurs, in benchmarks the Sandforce/Crucial are faster overall than the Intel, at home, playing games and surfing the net, can you tell and if not isn't the bigger capacity better? Thats really for individuals to decide.
Certainly you want, right now, to get a Crucial C300, a Sandforce or Intel based drives, Samsung, jmicron and Indilinx at the moment don't come close to the same performance yet are priced similarly so aren't at all good value for money.
EDIT:-
I guess the way to think about it is like graphics cards, would you prefer a card that does 100fps, but has minimum framerates of 5fps and that happens quite often, or a card that can only do 60fps max, but never drops below 55fps. The second is the far better card and will give you far better overall performance.
Think about random 4kb writes/reads as the "minimum FPS" of hard drives, essentially going for the drive that can do the best 4kb reads and writes will get you the best performance. This is where Intel does so well, its random writes are only beaten by the two newest drives, the random reads are only beaten by the Crucial drive and not the Sandforce ones and they aren't hugely slower than the Crucial yet are decent amount bigger for a very similar cost. 90% of people wouldn't feel any real difference in use between them, but 16gb's goes quite a long way.
