Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 (Archive)

[adamovera]

Are you still holding off on an SSD upgrade? You may not need to. Vendors are cutting their prices yet again. If you're on a budget, drives under $200 sure are tempting. This may be a temporary phenomenon, though; retailers are in "back to school" mode.

Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 : Read more

 

[adamovera]

Archived comments are found here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2575234/ssds-money-august-2012.html

 

[laststop311]

The crucial BX series ssd's should really be considered. They are priced very well and have performance right up there with samsung and use the lowest power by far of all ssd's. They are amazingly good for laptops. These drives only use like 2-3 watts at thier maximum and sip 1-2 watts when reading. They save multiple watts of power vs other ssd's and every bit helps when ur on a battery.

 

[CRamseyer]

The BX Series uses the same controller and 16nm ONFi Flash as the Mushkin Reactor which is on the list. The Reactor costs less at this time.

 

[GhostintheZoid]

i will never trust an ocz ever again.

 

[3ogdy]

Never buy OCZ. Reliability issues are an everyday thing. I know Toshiba owns them now.
How come there are no Samsung SSDs recommended? They must have lost some value.

OH, and Sandisk....watch out with their products. I own 2 SanDisk memory sticks. They have become read-only. Yep...can't paste on them, can't format them. SanDisk would NOT replace them...even though it's them who f....ucked up. (they acknowledged the issue publicly) Unbelievable, right?

Considering I own 4 more memory sticks by Kingston and Verbatim...it's obvious where the problem actually relies.

 

[alchemy69]

Current CPU performance was "unforeseen"? Except, you know, by Moore. 50 years ago. Maybe tone down the hyperbole and stick to the facts.

 

[TNT27]

How does the Samsung 850 Evo 250gb @ 90-100$ fair?

 

[Michael Keaton]

look at silicone power love mine and way faster than the 840 evo

 

[vertexx]

How do you guys rate the Transcend SSD370 series for a budget pick vs. Crucial?

 

[bak0n]

When did "The best SSD's" become synonymous with laptops and power drain? Am I the only one with way more desktops than laptops who doesn't care about drain?

 

[tfbww]

Any reason to be concerned by the latency of that Mushkin for gaming? Seems significant relative to others but I'm assuming it's nothing relative to a spinner. Yes?

 

[CRamseyer]

I'm evaluating the SSD370 right now. So far it looks like a strong performer at a really good price.

The 850 EVO 250GB at $90 would be a great deal. Remember at prices change several times a day but this article goes live once a month.

 

[Eggz]

Ooooooh, people are going to be upset about another Samsung omission!

Also, there's enough data out there on the the Intel 750 for it to have earned an April rec, no?

 

[synphul]

I think the older ocz got them a bad rep, the newer toshiba made ones are much better. I've also found despite being the knee-jerk go-to, a little reading shows that samsung aren't without their issues either. Still waiting for prices to keep dropping and/or performance to increase. Maybe it's just me but unless doing heavy multitasking I haven't seen much compelling performance to make ssd's a must have in a desktop. That's just me personally and I know the first thing everyone raves about is boot speed but that's such an irrelevant portion of time spent on a pc. My old timey hdd boots in mere seconds as well even without fastboot. 90% or more of the time my pc responds instantly and I've compared it to an identical system where the only difference is the ssd. Power efficiency is definitely a major plus for mobile users since many laptops were still using painfully slow 5400rpm drives to gain power efficiency. It is a bit odd that samsung didn't show up anywhere I'll agree.

 

[mapesdhs]

Never buy OCZ. Reliability issues are an everyday thing. ...

Blah blah, same old FUD. Sheesh, change the record already! Those issues were with really ancient
models; the later units (Vertex4 onwards) were not affected, the Vector was really good, ditto the
Vector 150, and the new setup with Toshiba has an improved support setup, etc.

Funny how so many are happy to jump all over an entity which effectively no longer exists except
in partial name, yet nobody mentions how other vendors have messed up in their own ways over
the years, including Intel and Samsung. Bashing OCZ has become fashionable, the in-thing to do
when commenting on SSDs. Gets on my nerves.


synphul, not sure what kind of drive you're using but I see a vast difference between SSDs and rust spinners
for boot drives. The few times in recent months I've had to briefly use a normal HDD for booting a system, it
felt like wading through mud.

Other major advantages of SSDs include much reduced impact of background tasks such as virus scans,
reduced loading times (both initial and in-game during transitions, level loads, etc.), reduced in-game
stuttering, less heat, no noise, etc.

I could never go back to rust spinners for boot drives, and I was already using the best 600GB 15K SAS models
which are far quicker than any consumer SATA. Bought ten more 240GB SSDs this week for further builds.

Ian.

 

[mapesdhs]

The BX Series uses the same controller and 16nm ONFi Flash as the Mushkin Reactor which is on the list. The Reactor costs less at this time.

Just curious btw Chris, why didn't the ARC-100 make the '512GB' budget pick? (ie. the ARC 480GB)
Is it because the MX100 512GB is usefully faster, or cheaper? Was wondering why the MX100 then
didn't beat out the ARC for the 240GB budget slot.

Ian.

 

[Eggz]

RE: SSD vs HDD

The felt difference becomes most apparent when using an HDD after getting used to an SSD, but not so much from using an SSD for the first time.

The same thing happens with GPU upgrades. You can easily get used to playing current AAA titles on a 750 ti, but after upgrading and getting used to a 980, going back to the 750 ti would make you wonder how you got used to it in the first place.

That's been my general experience with bottleneck alleviation over the years anyway. Upgrading doesn't feel like a magic pill at first, but downgrading back to where you were exposes the bottleneck because you see it with fresh eyes.

 

[coolitic]

I think samsung 850 evo deserves to be here.

 

[Symbiote_IV]

My HDD starts up Windows 8.1 in about 10 seconds. Not sure if that is unusual, but i can't possibly understand how an SSD shaving even 9 seconds(which they dont) off of that would matter. Though after it does start, disk usage spikes to 100% which i will need to figure out eventually, its probably screwing something up.

 

[mapesdhs]

My HDD starts up Windows 8.1 in about 10 seconds. ...

See my summary above, it's not remotely just about the startup time, though for some users that's
a very useful difference, those doing lots of testing, etc.

Way back I built a P55 system for my brother with a typical 1TB SATA of the day, a Samsung F3.
The CPU is an i7 870 @ 4GHz, GTX 460 SLI, 8GB RAM, etc. It took 2 mins 30s to load his favourite
game, and in-game pauses during level loads & transitions were annoying. Later I upgraded the system
to a Samsuing 840 250GB; even though the system is only SATA2 it cut the game loading time to less
than 20s, a huge difference, and the in-game pauses, etc. were almost completely gone. He was
delighted. Boot time was cut in half.

Responsiveness after bootup, not just the initial boot time, is much better with an SSD. The system
settling time with a normal HDD can be really annoying. Likewise, loading up a major app like AE
is way quicker with an SSD. The waiting times add up, session after session. Loading & saving
files, etc. Artists like "snappyness" in a system and SSDs help provide that feel.

Seems like most comments saying SSDs aren't that relevant tend to come from those who
don't already have one. ;D It makes such a difference in so many ways; anyone who has
a full suite of security sw installed will observe a major improvement in responsiveness when
a virus scan kicks off. Rust spinner makes the system sluggish, SSD allows a scan to
proceed without any noticeable slowdown.

I could list example after example. I think Eggz does maybe have point though, I hadn't
realised how much I'd gotten used to the speed of SSDs for use as C-drives until I had
to boot a system with a rust spinner; it felt painful having to wait for the system to boot,
settle, check for updates, etc. Everything felt so slooow. I think one gets used to booting
an SSD-system in a manner which means one can just get going with stuff as soon as
the desktop appears. One forgets how that's not possible with a rust spinner. Worst of
all was installing the batch of detected updates. Downloading them was no different, but
installing them was seriously yawn-inducing. Even a 60GB Vertex2E is so much better.

Ian.

 

[synphul]

Never buy OCZ. Reliability issues are an everyday thing. ...

synphul, not sure what kind of drive you're using but I see a vast difference between SSDs and rust spinners
for boot drives. The few times in recent months I've had to briefly use a normal HDD for booting a system, it
felt like wading through mud.

The boot drive on one system is a wd re4 7200rpm 1tb. The ssd boot drive in my other system is an ocz vertex 150 240gb. Both are running on identical mobo's with identical cpu's. Far as responsiveness with multitasking, some of that can be attributed to having 16gb ram on the system with the ssd vs 8gb on the one with the 7200rpm hdd. It makes a difference when you have multiple browsers and photo programs open switching back and forth, often times mem usage hits 12-14gb. For some reason even without fast boot enabled the re4 boots fast enough if needing to enter the bios you have to prematurely tap the del key or else you miss the window of opportunity.

Just my observation of the ssd performance, it is a little 'snappier' but not enough to warrant the cost at full price. I was expecting a lot more from all the raving and the difference really wasn't eye popping to me. I don't open/close apps a lot, usually if working they stay open just like the pc stays on. I wasn't too bothered since I grabbed the ocz on sale for $60. If it goes on sale again I'd probably buy another one but at full price they can keep them.

 

[Symbiote_IV]

My HDD starts up Windows 8.1 in about 10 seconds. ...

See my summary above, it's not remotely just about the startup time, though for some users that's
a very useful difference, those doing lots of testing, etc.

Way back I built a P55 system for my brother with a typical 1TB SATA of the day, a Samsung F3.
The CPU is an i7 870 @ 4GHz, GTX 460 SLI, 8GB RAM, etc. It took 2 mins 30s to load his favourite
game, and in-game pauses during level loads & transitions were annoying. Later I upgraded the system
to a Samsuing 840 250GB; even though the system is only SATA2 it cut the game loading time to less


Ian.

Oh i know its not just start up time. But thats what a lot of people talk about.

 

[mapesdhs]

Oh i know its not just start up time. But thats what a lot of people talk about.

Indeed you're right, they do, which is a shame as it's just one small part of a whole raft of benefits.

Hmm, maybe toms should do a more up to date direct comparison piece about SSDs, show how
they differ for normal use to a rust spinner, both a cheapo model like the eco green types and the
supposedly good ones like the WD Black, and throw in the best possible mechanical HDD one can
get, the modern equivalent of the 15K SAS I used way back. Mechanical drives offer reasonably
decent sequential I/O, so fine for storing movies (the main thing I'd use them for these days),
but they rapidly bog down for anything else (copying a mixed load from one driver to another shows
this very clearly, as I found when backing up my main 100GB installation sources archive from an
SSD to a 1TB SATA, ie. enough smaller files in the archive to slow the mechanical down severely).

However, that's just one example. I've run my own tests and obtained some limited typical data,
but it was focused specifically on showing how SSDs behaved with older SATA2. I have plenty of
other SSD models to test, and relevant mbds too, but not the time atm.

Any such comparison piece should also show how the older SSDs, though impressive for their
time, are nowhere near as good as modern products. I recently obtained a 64GB OCZ Onyx
which is downright slow compared to modern SSDs, and can easily be beaten for sequential
I/O by mechanical drives (scores just 171 with AS-SSD), and indeed the venerable Samsung F1
from the same era (first decent SATA I bought) is better for sequential I/O. I strongly recommend
reading some older SSD reviews to see just how far the technology has come in only a few short
years (hmm, couldn't find a toms review for the Onyx):

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ocz-ssd-roundup2.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3756/2010-value-ssd-100-roundup-kingston-and-ocz-take-on-intel
http://www.techspot.com/review/313-budget-ssd-roundup/page7.html

The techspot link above is particularly interesting. I think we've forgotten how back then numerous
SSDs didn't yet have the sequential I/O strength they have today, even though the random I/O
and access time advantages were already very clear. Reading forum comments from 5 years ago,
it's interesting to see just how much debate there was about the need for larger capacities, the
relevance of TRIM, etc.

Ian.

PS. One down side of SSDs not often mentioned is the issue of what happens when a unit fails.
To a fair extrent, rust spinners often begin to die in a manner which provides a degree of warning,
eg. bad blocks, giving time for corrective action. An SSD failure often means total device loss,
or at least a more complex & perhaps costly recovery process if one really does have to retrieve
data. Hence, these days with the prevalence of SSDs, having a sensible backup system is very
important.

 

[vertexx]

I refuse to use another PC without an SSD. For everyday use, I'd even drop the CPU to a lower cost model in order to fit an SSD into the budget. I agree that it is more about general responsiveness. The overall experience with an SSD is just faster - I'm not sure how you measure that. It would need to be some sort of latency measurement. But it's not just with launching apps. Navigating apps (especially web applications) is snappier with the SSD. Even things such as system alerts are more instantaneous. When I tried to go back to an HDD only system, it drove me nuts.

For an every-day multi-monitor desk driver, IMO nothing beats an A8-7600 paired with a 240/256GB Crucial, Samsung or Transcend (whichever happens to be cheaper). The combination of AMD integrated graphics and the SSD makes for an overall very well balanced system that is more responsive in every-day use than an I7 with Intel graphics and HDD.

For new systems, I'm generally recommending an SSD first and then the HDD as an upgrade when you need more space. $90-100 for a 240/256GB SSD makes that very affordable. A 1TB HDD is then only a ~$50 upgrade. Heck, now that 512GB prices have come down enough, that is getting to be my new entry point.