SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[frostedflakes]

That complicates things needlessly. Just how compressible is a "realistic load"? And how much does the Sandforce actually compress when given typical data? (not very much, I think). Better to stick with incompressible data so that the test is repeatable and we know how much is actually written to the flash.

AnandTech mentioned in the Vertex 3 preview I believe that all of their in-house SandForce drives had a write amplification of about 0.6x. So assuming a write amplification of 1.1 for incompressible data (seems reasonable since that's what Intel and other good controllers without compression/dedupe can achieve), as an OS drive it can compress host writes by about 45% on average.

I think it would be far more valuable to see how well the SF controller can deal with more realistic workloads like this than completely compressible or incompressible data. But just my $0.02.