Steady State
Steady state performance is often associated with enterprise workloads. For the most part, that is where I think it can stay. Client SSDs spend most of their time idling. The TRIM command, garbage collection and wear-leveling schemes have a chance to clean the NAND cells, which are kept ready for fresh writes.
The two images above are what we've come to associate with steady state performance. In a client environment, you never write 4KB blocks to your SSD for hours at a time. The first chart shows the second pass, not even the initial pass with clean cells available to absorb the write load. The second chart is what we are most interested in looking at. It illustrates your span of random performance in a worst-case scenario. Ideally, you'll see high IOPS throughput and a consistent flow of data, without much deviation.
There are some instances when steady state performance data is more relevant, such as prosumer workloads. Sequential mixed workload steady state testing shows us how a drive behaves after heavy multimedia editing on a secondary drive. Since we don't know what everyone's typical mix is, we show everything from 100% read to 0% read (which is 100% writes).
