Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 (Archive)

[g-unit1111]

Reliability is my primary concern, so my quick and dirty rule for SSDs is "No Sandfarce, and no OCZ."
I use a Crucial m4 mSATA (238GB formatted) as my system drive in my primary rig, and it is certainly fast enough, even though the mSATA slot is "only" 3Gb/s.
My other rig uses a 256GB Samsung 830 on a 6Gb/s port. I can not tell any performance difference based on the drive; the two rigs are too different to compare them directly.

This is why I don't take store reviews seriously. I had an Intel 320 120GB (highly rated on Newegg) - absolute disaster, nothing but problems with this drive. BSODs left and right. Wouldn't register Windows system updates. My work rig runs an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (not as highly rated on Newegg) and I was skeptical about the firmware updates. I've not had a single thing go wrong with this drive. So what does that say?

kitekrazy1963In my world there is no best SSD for the money when using a desktop for gaming. I'll take a 320-500GB Sata. ...

Ha my boss is the same way, I got the Vertex 4 for my PC and he's like "why would you pay money for a drive like that"? Of course I can do things in like 1/3 of the time that any other PC on the network can... even basic Adobe tasks. :lol:

 

[computerdoc_67]

This is why I don't take store reviews seriously. I had an Intel 320 120GB (highly rated on Newegg) - absolute disaster, nothing but problems with this drive. BSODs left and right. Wouldn't register Windows system updates. My work rig runs an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (not as highly rated on Newegg) and I was skeptical about the firmware updates. I've not had a single thing go wrong with this drive. So what does that say?

Frankly, I don't find Newegg or TigerDirect customer reviews to be very useful at all. If you have a fair technical background yourself, you begin to get the impression after reading many of the feedbacks (those people able to complete a coherent sentence) that either someone installed their [component of your choice], it worked, so the next day they submit a review praising it as the best quality thing they've ever used. Or someone installed their [component of your choice], probably shorted it out from their own stupidity, and submit a review claiming it's the worst quality piece of crap they ever used. Many of those opposing views about the same product. It leaves you with the impression 90% of the reviewers don't have a clue.

You do come across reviews that you can tell the reviewer probably has a good technical background from time to time, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

Therefore, I don't give their "egg" or "star" ratings any credibility whatsoever and only regard the feedback as anecdotal at best.

 

[xkronusx]

Why no mention of the 256GB plextor M5P extreme?

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249033

solid 256 gb ssd under $240 cad

 

[blazorthon]

Tom's might consider it not worth the price for us consumers. If it's not much better than it's M5S *brother*, then it certainly isn't worth that price considering that superior SSDs are available around that price and even cheaper. It if it much better than M5S, then perhaps Tom's simply hasn't gotten around to testing it. There are a lot of SSDS on the market and it might get difficult to keep track of them all and their prices at any given time, even if on a monthly basis.

 

[g-unit1111]

This is why I don't take store reviews seriously. I had an Intel 320 120GB (highly rated on Newegg) - absolute disaster, nothing but problems with this drive. BSODs left and right. Wouldn't register Windows system updates. My work rig runs an OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (not as highly rated on Newegg) and I was skeptical about the firmware updates. I've not had a single thing go wrong with this drive. So what does that say?

Frankly, I don't find Newegg or TigerDirect customer reviews to be very useful at all. If you have a fair technical background yourself, you begin to get the impression after reading many of the feedbacks (those people able to complete a coherent sentence) that either someone installed their [component of your choice], it worked, so the next day they submit a review praising it as the best quality thing they've ever used. Or someone installed their [component of your choice], probably shorted it out from their own stupidity, and submit a review claiming it's the worst quality piece of crap they ever used. Many of those opposing views about the same product. It leaves you with the impression 90% of the reviewers don't have a clue.

You do come across reviews that you can tell the reviewer probably has a good technical background from time to time, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

Therefore, I don't give their "egg" or "star" ratings any credibility whatsoever and only regard the feedback as anecdotal at best.

Yeah I really question the credibility of the people who claim to be technical experts on Newegg - are they actually technical experts, IT graduates, or they just know more than their parents / siblings because they're able to build their own system?

 

[cyan1d3]

Not sure why everyone keeps harping on OCZ, I have had one bad drive out of about 14 that I've bought, one quick RMA and everything has been great since.

 

[blazorthon]

Not sure why everyone keeps harping on OCZ, I have had one bad drive out of about 14 that I've bought, one quick RMA and everything has been great since.

They had a lot of QC issues and topped it off with inadequate customer service for many of their products. They've done a great job at fixing both of these problems with their current product lines of Vertex 4, Agility 4, Vector, and more, but some people are still annoyed about issues experiences in the past, especially with their SandForce SSDs early on.

 

[g-unit1111]

Not sure why everyone keeps harping on OCZ, I have had one bad drive out of about 14 that I've bought, one quick RMA and everything has been great since.

I don't get the hate either. The Sandforce drives were problematic - that's pretty much a given with all Sandforce SSDs (that includes Intel). But the experience I've had with the Vertex 4 has been rock solid since I took it out of the box.

 

[davec80]

No mention of the Sandisk ReadyCache? I see lots of people in comments arguing about reliability of certain brands of SSD as boot drive. Bottom line is that NONE of them are going to be as reliable as a spinning platter disk...which is pretty pathetic.
To me, the smartest thing to do is use SSD as cache, to speed up the regular hard drives. All the performance improvement, no extra risk. With Sandisk's version speeding up ALL installed hard drives for about 50 bucks delivered...it is hard to beat THAT for value!!!

 

[blazorthon]

No mention of the Sandisk ReadyCache? I see lots of people in comments arguing about reliability of certain brands of SSD as boot drive. Bottom line is that NONE of them are going to be as reliable as a spinning platter disk...which is pretty pathetic.
To me, the smartest thing to do is use SSD as cache, to speed up the regular hard drives. All the performance improvement, no extra risk. With Sandisk's version speeding up ALL installed hard drives for about 50 bucks delivered...it is hard to beat THAT for value!!!

The caching idea most certainly does not give all of the benefits of an SSD and most of the decent SSDs that avoid SandForce are more reliable than most hard disk drives, especially nowadays.

 

[zuluprime]

Seriously Yes

[citation][nom]abbadon_34[/nom]what about bootable pci-e ssd ??? regadless of the Enterprise designation often give, they are price competative with these and we are talking PERFORMANCE...[/citation]


[citation][nom]abbadon_34[/nom]what about bootable pci-e ssd ??? regadless of the Enterprise designation often give, they are price competative with these and we are talking PERFORMANCE...[/citation]

 

[flong777]

I own the Corsar GT 120 GB and the Vertex 4 128 GB. Recently Windows 7 corrupted the Corsair GT and I did a fresh install of Windows 7 on the Vertex 4 - I want completely erase the GT.

While the difference is small, you do notice the difference. The Vertex 4 writes faster than the GT and the GT reads faster. While it is razor close, I think the GT loads Windows a little faster.

For those criticizing OCZ, my Vertex 4 has been nothing but spectacular so far. It is more stable than the GT and has a 5 year warranty. I have also heard that OCZ's customer service is much better.

I read the articles of the problem OCZ SSDs ( in the past) and I understand why people don't trust them. OCZ was flat out dishonest more than once. All I can say is that so far I have nothing but praise for the Vertex 4. I have had zero problems with it. I can't say that about the Corsair GT - it blue-screened my operating system about once every other day.

 

[coolman99]

Reliability is my number one concern, and it should be a big concern to everyone (sadly, someone said who cares about reliability!).

I just bought a Dell 512 GB SSD (made by Micron) to use in my new Dell XPS 15z as the main drive.
Sadly, the disk was dead on arrival. So much for my excitement!!!

Micron's chips used to be among the best in the industry. Their quality has gone down hill for quite a while now.
Very much the same for Dell, and that's why Dell is struggling (Mike Dell has just took over and bought the company back)!
I doubt very much that I will totally trust an SSD at this time, but it is great to use it for the OS and programs, while having a complete, spare, backup drive, updated regularly.

The race should concentrate on reliability, not pushing all the limits of the silicone for speed. Most, if not all, humans would not feel the difference between 500 Mbits/s or 550 Mbits/s, for example.
The higher the speed, the closer the integration on a silicon chip, which means higher error rates that the firmware must deal with to correct the errors (and that is time too, by the way, so the throughput is greatly reduced). Multi-Level Cells (MLC) are already pushing the limits with their 4 states.

This race is a reminder of the mega-pixel race in digital camera. By magic the same size sensor got from about 2 mega-pixels all the way to 10, 12, 14, ..., and more mega-pixels!

While speed is great & wonderful, it becomes useless if there is no reliability.
I hope they start concentrating on reliability first.
1, 2, 10, or 100 millionths of a second is not the biggest deal for most of us. I just don't want a drive that will be dead in a few weeks, or a few months.

 

[blazorthon]

Reliability is my number one concern, and it should be a big concern to everyone (sadly, someone said who cares about reliability!).

I just bought a Dell 512 GB SSD (made by Micron) to use in my new Dell XPS 15z as the main drive.
Sadly, the disk was dead on arrival. So much for my excitement!!!

Micron's chips used to be among the best in the industry. Their quality has gone down hill for quite a while now.
Very much the same for Dell, and that's why Dell is struggling (Mike Dell has just took over and bought the company back)!
I doubt very much that I will totally trust an SSD at this time, but it is great to use it for the OS and programs, while having a complete, spare, backup drive, updated regularly.

The race should concentrate on reliability, not pushing all the limits of the silicone for speed. Most, if not all, humans would not feel the difference between 500 Mbits/s or 550 Mbits/s, for example.
The higher the speed, the closer the integration on a silicon chip, which means higher error rates that the firmware must deal with to correct the errors (and that is time too, by the way, so the throughput is greatly reduced). Multi-Level Cells (MLC) are already pushing the limits with their 4 states.

This race is a reminder of the mega-pixel race in digital camera. By magic the same size sensor got from about 2 mega-pixels all the way to 10, 12, 14, ..., and more mega-pixels!

While speed is great & wonderful, it becomes useless if there is no reliability.
I hope they start concentrating on reliability first.
1, 2, 10, or 100 millionths of a second is not the biggest deal for most of us. I just don't want a drive that will be dead in a few weeks, or a few months.

You make a decent point about reliability being important, but your examples seem poor. 550Mbits per second is downright awful for a modern SSD, Micron is still one of the most reliable companies for SSDs, and it's only fair to say how higher speeds really aren't brought on by higher silicon chip integration as you put it, at least not as far as I can interpret what that means (I assume that you're referring to a smaller process node by that, but IDK fore sure).

 

[longinthetooth]

With Entry level enthusiasts and Desktop PCs in mind, you recommend SSD particularly with Z68 motherboards for Caching, however, can't find any reviews of motherboards in this category? Nice to see such a review and also including how best to set up caching in such a situation?

 

[blazorthon]

With Entry level enthusiasts and Desktop PCs in mind, you recommend SSD particularly with Z68 motherboards for Caching, however, can't find any reviews of motherboards in this category? Nice to see such a review and also including how best to set up caching in such a situation?

They don't specifically recommend Z68 motherboards for Intel's caching. Z77 has it too. Besides, there is a lot of good free caching software that isn't locked to a particular board, so it doesn't really matter.

 

[Toby Fruth]

My Vector and Vertex have both run fine for months, no issues. OCZ apparently had some quality control/quality assurance issues at some point, but seemed to have rectified.

 

[flong777]

Reliability is my number one concern, and it should be a big concern to everyone (sadly, someone said who cares about reliability!).

I just bought a Dell 512 GB SSD (made by Micron) to use in my new Dell XPS 15z as the main drive.
Sadly, the disk was dead on arrival. So much for my excitement!!!

Micron's chips used to be among the best in the industry. Their quality has gone down hill for quite a while now.
Very much the same for Dell, and that's why Dell is struggling (Mike Dell has just took over and bought the company back)!
I doubt very much that I will totally trust an SSD at this time, but it is great to use it for the OS and programs, while having a complete, spare, backup drive, updated regularly.

The race should concentrate on reliability, not pushing all the limits of the silicone for speed. Most, if not all, humans would not feel the difference between 500 Mbits/s or 550 Mbits/s, for example.
The higher the speed, the closer the integration on a silicon chip, which means higher error rates that the firmware must deal with to correct the errors (and that is time too, by the way, so the throughput is greatly reduced). Multi-Level Cells (MLC) are already pushing the limits with their 4 states.

This race is a reminder of the mega-pixel race in digital camera. By magic the same size sensor got from about 2 mega-pixels all the way to 10, 12, 14, ..., and more mega-pixels!

While speed is great & wonderful, it becomes useless if there is no reliability.
I hope they start concentrating on reliability first.
1, 2, 10, or 100 millionths of a second is not the biggest deal for most of us. I just don't want a drive that will be dead in a few weeks, or a few months.

I think that SSDs are gradually winning the reliability wars and that they will continue to do so in the future because they have no moving parts. No storage is 100% safe but in the future SSDs will probably be by far the most reliable system of storage until they are improved upon by a different media.

While I agree with you that reliability is very important, of more importance is backing up any data stored on any HDD or SSD since no system is "reliable." SSDs are so new that there are very few statistics to verify just how reliable they are or not. I think the real verification are the hundreds of millions that are being sold. We do not hear of a great deal of failures so far. We will know more in the next 5-10 years as millions of SSDs near there write capacities, though we probably already understand this from enterprise uses in business.

My Corsair GT 120 GB SSD had a firmware issue that caused blue screens periodically and Corsair issued a firmware update to correct it. However it was very irritating and the firmware update could have bricked the drive (according to Corsair). However, it would still would have been covered by warranty.

The point is that they are still working out the bugs in SSDs and we seem to be in sort of beta test right now - but that is true about a lot of things in computers.

 

[RomXXII]

How come The Sandisk Extreme SSDs aren't ranked here?

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]The caching idea most certainly does not give all of the benefits of an SSD and most of the decent SSDs that avoid SandForce are more reliable than most hard disk drives, especially nowadays.[/citation]

Again the hate with OCZ. These issues were all down to firmware, all fixed. All other
manufacturers including Intel have had their own screwups, or have we forgotten
the 8MB bricked Intel problem? Indeed, with the fw sorted out, that's why Sandisk
brought out its own 2nd-gen SF model because it now works very well. That's not
to say OCZ didn't screw up the support aspects at the time, but that's no reason to
decry SF-based products today.

I have more than 30 OCZ drives, not had a problem with any of them, and I really
like OCZ's Toolbox application (can't say the same for other makes, except Samsung
which is also good). The key is just to upgrade the fw before doing anything with a drive.

Having said all that, as with the Samsung 830 I'm very impressed with the consistent
performance behaviour of the Samsung 840 (I have a 250GB as a C-drive for my 3930K).
I ran an HDTach just now:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/samsung_840_250GB_HDTach_22-May-2013.gif

I've never seen any of my OCZs show such a smooth graph wrt long term use. Beats me
how Samsung manage it, but I like it. An 840 Pro would be nice, but that was out of my
price range (bagged a couple of 256GB Vectors on eBay instead for good prices; one now
runs my 2700K, the other is for benchmarking and then eventually a 990X setup). Will be
interesting to see how the Vector performs over time.

Ian.

PS. Never use a Marvell controller to do a secure erase or firmware update. I wonder
how many people way back had OCZ problems caused or made worse by the use of
a Marvell controller.

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]They had a lot of QC issues and topped it off with inadequate customer service for many of their products. They've done a great job at fixing both of these problems with their current product lines of Vertex 4, Agility 4, Vector, and more, but some people are still annoyed about issues experiences in the past, especially with their SandForce SSDs early on.[/citation]

That's a better summary, but one should add that the SF drives are also ok now aswell.

Ian.

 

[mapesdhs]

I'd be interested to see how those Vert 3/RAID combinations compare running on the SATA-3 bus.

I'm still pondering how to do these tests, as none of my boards have more than two native
Intel SATA3 ports. Is it really worth my doing tests with the Marvell controllers when we
already know those controllers are poor? (a couple of boards have 4x Marvell SATA3). All
that would tell us is how bad Marvell controllers are, rather than the real potential of native
SATA3 SSD RAID. I initially thought my M4E board had 4 Intel ports, because of the colour
coding, but nope, two of them are Marvell.

Likewise, not much point testing sw RAID that stripes across different controllers (I wouldn't
trust a setup like that).

So which boards do have more than two Intel SATA3 ports? Anyone here have such a thing?

And why isn't the designer of the Marvell chip in stocks in a public square so we can throw
rotten food, etc.? Grrr...


Indeed, how did the mbd industry end up using Marvell chips so much when their performance
is so awful? Didn't anyone check? The drivers are often terrible too; several times I've found
certain releases to cause major instability, had to roll them back or remove completely.

Ian.

 

[computertech82]

There's something extremely important missing.....reliability. Many ssds here have 1 star reviews on online stores because they DIED within days or month. How about something about reliability on ssds?

 

[mapesdhs]

There's something extremely important missing.....reliability. Many ssds here have 1 star reviews on online stores because they DIED within days or month. How about something about reliability on ssds?

And how likely do you think it is that people who have NO problems at all
even think about posting an online review rating? Site ratings of that kind
are stastistical garbage. They mean nothing. By definition they're always
low because those who've had a problem are far more likely to post any
rating at all.

Ian.

 

[pyro226]

May I ask Tom's Hardware to update this article a little bit more frequently? Even if the recommendations don't change much, it would help let readers know that the suggestions are still up to date.