Why does SSD benchmark so low in smaller puters? What holds them back?

[idata]

Anyone have any idea why the huge differences in benhmarks?

[idata]

I don't know what is " lower powered puters" but first of all I think you have used wrong benchmarking tools. SSD gives you great IO (number of operations per second - SSD can do thousands versus hundreds IOs that can HDD do ) and great access time (SSD 0.1-0.3ms, HDD - more than 5ms (best possible)), read/write speed can be above or similar to HDD (for Intel SSDs).

Use google to find out more information.

You can also use ATTO http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1137/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_v2.34.html http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1137/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_v2.34.html

I am not sure about your situation. But there can be several reasons of such perfomance. Chipsets and SATA controllers and compatibility with SSDs, drivers can do such things and firmware. For example SATA-1 limits speed to about ~110MB/s, etc.