Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 (Archive)

[makaveli316]

I just got a Samsung 830 256gb for 150 euro - sweeeet.

 

[Guest]

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OCZ Agility 4 256GB Internal Solid State Drive
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Solid State Drives
SATA SSD
O261-9802

OCZ Agility 4 AGT4-25SAT3-256G 256GB Internal Solid State Drive - 2.5" Form Factor, SATA III, 6Gbps, TRIM, Ndurance 2.0 TechnologyItem#: O261-9802 | Model#: AGT4-25SAT3-256G
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[honkwomp4]

I bought the Mushkin 240....DX based on October's best SSD for the money, but was surprised to see that it is not included in your benchmarking charts

 

[honkwomp4]

After you said this I went and checked

86 percent of the 43 reviews were either 5 star or 4 star. there were 4 1 stars (that is 10 percent) and 1 each of two and 3

When you only have 43 reviews, every review counts and it is clear the samsungs are considerably more popular, and so, when they have been hit with a 1 star, it tends to be wiped out buy the sheer number of happy clients

By comparison, I do see the Samsungs are rated in the low 90's positive and but even they get some 1 stars

I would agree that when it comes to a hard drive, reliability is king and the 4 bad reviews do gripe about early fails.
I do own the mushkin, having bought it based on the review. We will see. As I had a mechanical hard drive partitioned for windows, I am in the process of doing some very heavy copying operations. We will see how this affects things 6 months down the road.

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos has an awful lot one-star reviews on Newegg.

Just sayin'...

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]honkwomp4[/nom]I bought the Mushkin 240....DX based on October's best SSD for the money, but was surprised to see that it is not included in your benchmarking charts[/citation]

The Chronos Delux and Vertex 3 MAXIOPS (also the Patriot Wildfire IIRC) have identical performance at the same capacity, so they weren't given separate places in the chart. This is said right in the article. THey're all second-generation SandForce SATA 6Gb/s SSDs with toggle-mode DDR flash.

 

[Morkintash]

[citation][nom]Nintendo Maniac 64[/nom]Seriously? No mention of the Samsung 830 at ALL? The 128GB model is only $90 on Amazon/Newegg![/citation]

I've been running my gaming PC on the Mushkin Chronos here for 8 months. No problems here.
I can't imagine what people are doing to theirs to give it a single star... Then again, I may have been lucky and got a solid product?

 

[Morkintash]

Looks like I quoted the wrong person in my previous comment because of slow loading adds scrolling the page down slighly on the school computer... again. T_T

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Morkintash[/nom]Looks like I quoted the wrong person in my previous comment because of slow loading adds scrolling the page down slighly on the school computer... again. T_T[/citation]

Portable web browser with Adblock. Problem solved and you don't even need to install anything.

 

[arjunratnadev]

Generally better pricing and at least compared to the Samsung 830, better performance. There's plenty of reason to go with OCZ. Furthermore, how OCZ did the launch isn't really bad. They could release it as it was at the time and improve it along the way, or simply wait until they've already improved it (which would probably take longer and probably also mean higher launch prices).

At that point, you're not an unpaid beta tester because you got the drive cheaper than you would have if OCZ had to wait months to a year or more before getting it *ready*. Besides, it's not like Vertex 4 wasn't a good drive for the money even when it launched and the support that OCZ has offered to Vertex 4 owners is superb, to say the least.

Furthermore, Samsung has had firmware issues. No SSD company has been truly free of them.

Sir,
I AM CURRENTLY USING A MECHANICAL HARDRIVE WHICH IS MUCH MUCH SLOWER THAN AN SSD AND EVEN LAG IN GAME PERFORMANCE. I am a CONSTANT GAMER and learning PROGRAMMING IN ALL THE LANGUAGES AND CAN USE DATABASE AND IN FUTURE I MAY BE INTERESTED IN ANIMATION ALSO. I AM THINKING OF SPENDING AROUND 250-280 Dollars only to buy a SSD upto 240 GB memory FOR USING it FOR PRIMARY storage CURRENTLY I MEAN TO SAY JUST TO INSTALL THE OPERATING SYSTEM IN IT WITH ALL THE DRIVERS AND SOFTWARE SO THAT IT COULD RESPOND FAST AND THEN, I THINK OF USING MECHANICAL HARDDRIVE FOR USING SECONDARY STORAGE OR ALSO GAMING STORAGE. You see I want my OS to respond fast and when the mechanical harddrive is in secondary storage it will have an optimum data transfer rate because it will only used for data transfer and not by operating system and I have motherboard of ASUS-M5A97 which I guess is SATA-III compatible I dont really know that but it sure has a USB 3.0 and aslo I cannot afford for more costly SSD for now and also I dont completely believe in SSDs cause its new and even if my 240 GB primary SSD with operating system crashes I dont care I can switch back to mechanical. I am in India right now and I dont see the OCZ VERTEX 4 256 GB in Indian market and currently in Indian market Corsair Force Series GS 240 SSD has a 90 K I/OPS and there is only OCZ VERTEX 4 128 GB in the Indian market which is fast but has less IOPS then that of Corsair GS 240 GB I dont know how to tell the difference between them. And between Corsair Force 240 GT Series and Corsair Force GS 240 I believe Corsair Force GS 240 could be fastest, but Corsair customer care told me that there is really not much difference in performace of Corsair Force GT 240 with 85 k IOPS and Corair GS 240 GB with 90 k IOPS so what should I do, should I go ahead and order Corsair Force Series GS 240 SSD for installing the OS or should I wait for the market settle down. Please sir anyone help me understand and buy the best SSD required for my single user purpose of gaming programming, learing database and maybe in future software. And if someone can, please also do tell me the difference between OCZ AGILITY series and OCZ Vertex series Thank you. Your believer in Tech tips TOMs hardware ARJUN RD.

 

[arjunratnadev]

I would love it if you guys would include a chart, like your transfer speed chart, that also factors Price and Capacity in the ranking.

I took the first price from Amazon to build this and weighted the Capacity and Speed equally, normalized to Price (enhanced GB/$)... Not sure that's the most realistic, but you get the idea, and it helps identify good value/capacity/speed compromise points.

Thanks,

Ben

Sorry, the formatting on this sucks
[cpp] Capacity Speed Price (C+S)/P
M3Pro 128 214 115 3.0
830 64 142 70 2.9
V3 120 149 100 2.7
Agility3 120 114 90 2.6
M3 128 182 120 2.6
V3IOPS 120 179 120 2.5
830 256 201 185 2.5
SSD330 120 127 100 2.5
Agility4 128 104 95 2.4
V4 256 191 195 2.3
V3 240 194 190 2.3
Agility4 256 130 170 2.3
M4 256 168 188 2.3
SSD330 180 141 150 2.1
Agility3 180 122 150 2.0
SSD520 240 183 235 1.8
Perf.Pro 128 171 190 1.6
SSD320 300 121 450 0.9
470 256 124 500 0.8
[/cpp]

SIR I AM ALWAYS IN FOR SPEED FOR RESPONSE TIMES WHILE GAMING BUT I ALSO DO PROGRAMMING AND I AM INTERESTED IN ANIMATION ALSO, I AM THINKING OF USING CORSAIR FORCE GT SERIES 240 GB WITH 85 K IOPS OR CORSAIR FORCE GS SERIES 240 GB WITH 90 K IOPS IN YOUR APPRECIABLE CHART ABOVE YOU HAVE NOWHERE MENTIONED THE CORSAIR SSD WHY, do you think that Corsair is not worth it or is not pretty reliable.

 

[blazorthon]

Corsair Force is second generation Sandforce. Force is basically identical to Agility 3, Force GS is basically identical to Vertex 3 MAXIOPS, and Force GT is basically identical to Vertex 3 IIRC. There's no need to add data for models that have identical performance to other models once it is proven that they have identical performance.

If you want a recommendation, then I recommend avoiding SandForce based drives. Go for something with either a Samsung or Marvel controller or such (Samsung SSDs, OCZ Vertex 4, OCZ Agility 4, Crucial M4, Plextor SSDs, and maybe a few others that I'm forgetting). OCZ Vector, Corsair Neutron, and Corsair Neutron GTX are also great. Just go for one of these that is the cheapest for the capacity that you want in your country.

Also, the difference between OCZ Vertex and OCZ Agility is the NAND flash interface. Agility uses asynchronous flash and Vertex uses synchronous flash. Synchronous flash is generally faster, although by how much varies. Then the Vertex MAXIOPS and a few other drives use something else called Toggle mode DDR flash and it is a little bit faster than Synchronous, but not as much faster as Synchronous is compared to asynchronous.

SSDs have been around for several years and the technology is more than twenty years old. They're not new at all. Those that I listed in the second paragraph of this post are all very reliable SSD families and/or brands.

Rated performance for most SSDs is generally not very accurate, especially in the case of SandForce SSDs where they can only get anywhere near their rated speeds in specific types of workloads (IE those using data that is easily compressed significantly by Sandforce compression). This compression weakness is not shared by any of the SSDs that I listed in my second paragraph.

Don't worry about not having SATA 6Gb/s. It usually isn't a big deal to not have it and isn't likely to hurt your experience with modern SSDs much if at all.

 

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Wait, how the heck did the 40GB Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Duluxe for $55 NOT get the recommendation over the 30GB Corsair Nova 2, especially considering they both cost the same on Newegg?
Mushkin: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226168
Corsair: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233266

Yes it is true the Mushkin costs over $65 on Amazon, but surely Tom's isn't only using Amazon's pricing to assemble this guide...

 

[jonjonjon]

the graphs on the last page are horrible. you have to stare at it for a minute to figure out what is going on. sort of defeats the purpose of a graph.

 

[army_ant7]

Just checking (since I haven't seen your review for the Samsung 840 (non-Pro)), but does it get beaten that much by the older 830 series?

The 120GB 840 is in Tier 6, while just the 64GB 830 is in the tier above (Tier 5), and the 128GB 830 is 3 Tiers above it (Tier 3). Maybe it performs like so do differentiate it from the 840 Pro SSD's?


Also, I'm wondering about the 10% difference that each tier is supposed to vvary by. Is it 10% faster or slower? Like would the SSD's in Tier 1 be in the neighborhood of 110% (performance) of the Tier 2 ones (generally-speaking), or would the Tier 2 ones be in the neighborhood of 90% of the Tier 1 ones?

(Again) also, assuming it's the "faster" situation I mentioned above, would the drives in Tier 1 be in the neighborhood of 190% of the Tier 10 ones (got from basing the 10% differences on the Tier 10 drives)
or
would they be in the neighborhood of about 240% of the Tier 10 ones (got from basing the 10% differences on the preceding tier drives, e.g. Tier 9 drives are 110% the speed of the Tier 10 ones, while the Tier 8 drives are 110% the speed of the Tier 9 ones, thus are 121% (= 110% * 110%) the speed of the Tier 10 ones)?

 

[army_ant7]

@arjunratnadev
Hey there... Just want to point out that netiquette dictates that words or sentences in all-caps indicate shouting and that we should avoid making them. I guess it's just to avoid misunderstandings, like people thinking you're angry or something.

I recommend using bold letters, italics, or underlines to emphasize certain sentences or words if that's what you wish to do. Tom's Hardware happens to allow you to use those formats.

Happy posting!

 

[MC_K7]

I'm disappointed that there's no mention of the Plextor M5 Pro, it received a lot of good reviews here's one of them:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/plextor_m5_pro_ssd_benchmark_review_test,17.html

Also it's price recently dropped to 219$ on Newegg so I'm really tempted to get it. All the reviews I've read is that it offers better real life performance than most competitors (more stable sustained read and write performance, lower latency, better IOPS, etc...) and it's backed by a 5 year warranty. Compared to 270$ for the Samsung 840 Pro, to me the Plextor looks better especially with a 60$ difference... there's a limit where I want to pay for a name and reputation.

 

[cbrunnem]

[citation][nom]killerclick[/nom]Mushkin Enhanced Chronos has an awful lot one-star reviews on Newegg.Just sayin'...[/citation]
it also has over 600 reviews and newegg reviews are to the knowledgeable person, not completely accurate.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

I wasn't sure if these SSDs would be fast enough for me and my powerful machine, so I bought 2 512GB Vectors and built a software-based RAID0 on my SATAI controller. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. I was led to believe that Win8 would boot just by my thinking it (still takes far too long at about 20 secs.), and my internet speeds would increase by a factor of 100 (nope...DSL is still crawling at 3.8Mbps). Definitely not worth it.

 

[army_ant7]

@NewbieTechGodII
What made you think that you're Internet speed would increase with an SSD?! Sorry, it's just that AFAIK, those two are independent from each other. Maybe you should consider switching to cable?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what would happen if a storage drive can't keep up with download speed for any reason at all. I mean, if it can't write fast enough for the incoming data. Maybe the RAM would serve as a buffer? Well, I guess it would depend on the program (like your browser) that's doing the downloading.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

@NewbieTechGodII
What made you think that you're Internet speed would increase with an SSD?! Sorry, it's just that AFAIK, those two are independent from each other. Maybe you should consider switching to cable?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what would happen if a storage drive can't keep up with download speed for any reason at all. I mean, if it can't write fast enough for the incoming data. Maybe the RAM would serve as a buffer? Well, I guess it would depend on the program (like your browser) that's doing the downloading.

Oh army_ant...did I need to put the </sarcasm> tag at the end of my post?

 

[army_ant7]

@NewbieTechGodII
Honestly, yeah... It's just that the wording made me think that you really thought it would (not to insult your intelligence) because on the Internet (or plainly just in life for that matter) people do have misconceptions sometimes, as silly as they may be, and it's up to people like us to help them out (if we choose to, also, not to say we don't have misconceptions of our own). Hehehe...

BTW, did I read that right? A SATA I controller? As in the 150MB/s one?

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

@NewbieTechGodII
Honestly, yeah... It's just that the wording made me think that you really thought it would (not to insult your intelligence) because on the Internet (or plainly just in life for that matter) people do have misconceptions sometimes, as silly as they may be, and it's up to people like us to help them out (if we choose to, also, not to say we don't have misconceptions of our own). Hehehe...

BTW, did I read that right? A SATA I controller? As in the 150MB/s one?

Ooops! Good catch there! Obviously I didn't mean I was using a SATAI controller (god those are slooooooooww)...what I meant to say was that I am using an iSATA controller (you know- the super fast ones from Apple?). I love my iSATA controller because it locks me into a particular ecosystem and protects me from myself. Oh, and the best part is that if something went wrong with my system (which is impossible because Apple is involved, agreed?), I don't have to worry about the hassle of replacing the defective part. Nope, I get to buy a whole new PC! How sweet is that?

 

[army_ant7]

@NewbieTechGodII
Nope, never heard of Apple having an exclusive SATA controller, I don't think. "Super fast"? Can you give a specific max transfer speed like 150MB/s (SATA I), 300MB/s (SATA II), or 600MB/s (SATA III)? Maybe your lackluster experience with your RAID 0 SSD's may have something to do with that SATA controller, MacOS (drivers or something), or your CPU or something not being able to keep up.

 

[NewbieTechGodII]

@NewbieTechGodII
Nope, never heard of Apple having an exclusive SATA controller, I don't think. "Super fast"? Can you give a specific max transfer speed like 150MB/s (SATA I), 300MB/s (SATA II), or 600MB/s (SATA III)? Maybe your lackluster experience with your RAID 0 SSD's may have something to do with that SATA controller, MacOS (drivers or something), or your CPU or something not being able to keep up.

Trying to measure the data rate of these super-fast iSATA controllers is impossible for mere humans. Several researchers have made the attempt only to go mad with insanity from the controller's ridiculous top-speeds. It's so kick-ass that it even plays Crysis...by itself!

 

[ocmusicjunkie]

I currently run systems with OS drives ranging from a 120gb Kingston V+200 to a RAID-0 array of two Intel 180gb drives.... I can tell you that unless you are building a rig for benchmark scores, you will see no noticeable difference in any SSD you pick from. Go with what is reliable, and what fits your space needs. That's all to worry about at this point.