Macbook Air SSD : Samsung vs Toshiba ???

[..]Toshiba SSD has better random read speed but poorer random write speed. Good for opening application or files or booting up OS.

The strong point of Samsung SSD (if the specs are identical to the Samsung 470) is when it comes to heavy random read task. Toshiba (if identical to Kingston V+) will tank in the same situation, although there's no drop in speed compared to single queue but in comparison Samsung 470 will increase a lot in speed. Think of application like flashget/iGetter, Toshiba handles single segment downloads slightly better than Samsung, but Samsung can have multiple segments to accelerate the download speed few times more.

On the other hand Toshiba SSD appears to have the most solid Garbage Collection among many other SSD. Toshiba SSD seems never drop in performance after the drive get filled up with multiple datas write cycles. Samsung SSD on pre 10.6.8 probably not a great idea as there's no TRIM support. However, on Lion, Samsung SSD will not suffer from the "lazy" Garbage Collection. Samsung has updated the firmware few times since then, so I guess there isn't much differences between Toshiba/Samsung in this regard.

In the end, those are just based on lab test of Samsung 470 versus Kingston V+. They may or may not reflect the same results on the SSD used on MBA. Even if they did, both are basically equalled in performance. In the real world, you probably will not experience any difference between the two. Or put it this way - both has strong point and weak point, so you won't get the best of both world.

Buy it and enjoy.


PS: If you're into audio production, you may want to keep an eye on the SSD model. If the Samsung can handle multiple random read queues much better than Toshiba, it may be very well benefit multi audio track mixing/recording and especially, samples streaming for large sample library which consist of large amount of random clusters. Never did any real tests though, so you may want to take my words with a pinch of salt.

via: MacRumors Forum