SSD transfer rates and hidden features

[Astroman]

even though this started with a non-Mac related drive, there some common facts may be usefull.

I once bought a RevoDrive 120, which is 2 64 GB striped array of flash memory, driven by a RAID controller, all on a PCIe card. Advertized with transfer rates in the 400MB/sec range for both input and output - kind of outdated now, but experience may still apply.

First of all: this thing NEVER performed even remotely to those advertizing figures.
More like a very fast HD, but at least it was silent - and a great lightshow inside the case...
I assumed some installation/driver mistake on my side, but first wanted to check deeper because a drive wipe would trash some non-recoverable software.

I'm not interested in bench figures, just want to know how long it takes to copy certain folders or files and calculate the (my personal) effective rate.
Did this with the next best directory of audio files... ok, not exited.
Opened the DAW, added the same files sequentially and rendered the result into a single file.
Copied the file and voilà: what took half a minute before happened in 2 seconds.
Transfer rate promise fulfilled.

Not very useful in this particular case because the drive is simply way too small, but it might be usefull as a scratchpad drive, though.
It definitely doesn't speed up OS tasks as you would expect - on the other hand DAW and (not tested myself) video rendering is improved significantly.

This drive fails completey on almost every benchmark app for it's built in on the fly hardware copression. More important: benchmarks don't take file system overhead into account.
Another interesting advice: benchmarks really wear SSDs. Extended test periods are strongly discouraged.
If a drive performs nicely on daily use, it's all good. No need to squeeze that last bits from the controller, if your file system adds a magnitude more of latency in the end anyway.
Not to forget the regular file cache, which can be extensive in current systems and 'hides' the SSD advantage in cases of data reuse after the first load.