Thanks for the details. I wonder if the the Samsung 470 is considered to have a decent enough Garbage Collection to invest in, since I don't have Windows installed. Or the GC in Intel's 320? Any other SSD that would fit the bill I would be more than open to.This is true, however, when I get a new Mac I will not have to buy a new SSD. On a SATAIII connection the drive will almost double it's transfer speeds. New Mac and new SSD (sort of) I will be getting something new within the 5 year warranty. Most people will.
All Mac Pros are limited to 280ish MB/s because of the SATA link speed. There are other factors and it appears the CPU has too much to do with the HD benchmarking in Xbench.
The thing about benchmarks is that you really need to perform accepted benchmark tests. There are standards out there for a reason. HDtach, 3dMark, Luxmark, Cinebench, etc. If you use anything else you can't really do an apples to apples comparison without buying all the tech and having it your home so you can test it against your Xbench. Becasue no one uses Xbench as a serious benchmark.
Because those numbers are not listed as sequential and random scores. They are total bandwidth scores. How much data can travel down the pipe in an optimal circumstance. The drive has to do a lot more work when performing the sequential and random tasks.
They are only consistent within Xbench and have very little barring on reality.
You don't need TRIM with Sandforce based SSD's. In fact it sometimes slows them down. You are automatically protected from performance degradation because you bought an OWC SSD. It has protection built into it's chipset. Which is why OWC pushed them for Mac's. In earlier SSD market they were some of the only drives that worked well on a Mac. Other manufacturers are starting to develop on board garbage collection or whatever you want to call it. So the options are now more broad.
(By the way my Mac Pro has the 3.2 Hex installed. The OWC SSD was originally in last year's Macbook Pro. The Xbench scores are a bit better now than then, but not that much.)