Synthetic benchmarks are handy for providing an insight into the outright capability of any given drive, but you also need to know how that translates into real world performance.

As our results show, the huge gap in synthetic performance isn't fully reflected in applications.

That said, the HD Tach random access test does hint at the clear advantage SSDs have when it comes to day-to-day responsiveness.

Synthetic drive performance

Burst speed

Random access times

File decompression speed