Performance issues when using SSD for a developer notebook (WAMP/LAMP stack)?

In other words, disk-level benchmarks give outstanding results to your SSD, while when used in practice, the disk is hellishly slow. So something is slowing things down, making access to files much slower than expected.

There might be few reasons:

  • The most probable: there is an antivirus. Some are really benchmark killers, and you can hardly predict how do they affect performance without testing.

  • Something other makes it slow to access file. Every time you seem to test many operations on small amounts of data. But what are the performances when you read or write a 10 GB file?

  • OS-related configuration might be different. For example the OS is using cache for small files one the machine with the hard drive, but not on the machine with an SSD. In this case, benchmarks are wrong for the first machine, since you're not really testing the speed of the hard disk.

  • Disk-related configuration might be different. Options like those related to write-caching policy (in Windows) can affect performance.

  • The SSD may not function properly.