Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 (Archive)

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CO builder

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Why choose the SanDisk over the Samsung in 250MB or 500MB? The text still compares them to the MX100.

Maybe the table with two performance picks and no budget picks in 250 and 500 has it right ?
 

CRamseyer

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The Extreme PRO has higher workstation performance and lower latency under heavy workload. We will get the chart fixed up here in a few minutes.
 
The initial assessment seems accurate. Other than a couple drives that outright failed, the performance of any SSD I've bought has not been remarkably different from any other. The CPU makes a difference. Adding a 500GB Samsung SSD to my low-power Lenovo X140E made only a modest speed difference in application load times, more noticeably reduced boot time (Win7/64 Pro), but added at least half an hour to battery life, compared to the stock 7200RPM hdd.
 

alan1476

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I own the Extrme Pro in the 480 and 960GB flavors and they are discounted at many of the big online retailers, I got the 480gb model for 216.00 and the 960gb model for 389.00, 10 year warrantee, ( not that Iwll be using these in 10 years but its nice to know that they have the confidence in the SSD to offer this.
 

Gurg

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Re: Samsung SM951: "check with your manufacturer because support outside of 8- and 9-Series chipsets can be spotty"
Better check with your motherboard manufacturer and be extremely careful as to how you word your questions. A X4 M.2 PCIe SSD MAY RUN in your M.2 slot, but for a SM951 or Hyperx to run at full speed it also needs to be a X4 M.2 slot. It isn't simply a matter of having 4 lanes available after those required for your sli or crossfire. Further using the M.2 slot for a PCIe SSD may disable some of the SATA ports on the motherboard so you may need to reconfigure which SATA ports you use. Finally be real clear when talking to the motherboard OEM that you will be plugging the card into the M.2 slot; not using it in a card on a PCIe slot. I wasn't precise enough in asking the questions, and now have a HyperX 240 that will only run at 793R/647W in the M.2 slot of my Gigabyte x99 ud4.
 

Jeffs0418

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850 evo says 5 year warranty in the chart but 3 years after. I am pretty sure its 5 years now
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB has a 5 year or 75TB written warranty. the two larger EVO's (500GB and 1TB) double the write longevty to 150TB written.
I just upgraded from a Kingston V300 120GB to a 250GB EVO and am quite happy with it. The proprietary software is a very welcome addition.
 

MasterMace

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I like the "best for the money" lists, but I am not a fan of the "Best" lists. The first section is "Top Value", and yet it ignores the first price people are looking at - the reasonable price. You're not able to afford a $141 storage in a sub $500 build. I would like to see more focus on these lower budget units, such as ones around $50-60 for these low budget builds. Adding to this is the "256GB Budget Buy" being at $150, a full $9 MORE expensive than the "256GB Performance Pick" - if the Performance Pick performs better than the Budget pick, and it is cheaper, that budget pick has no place on this chart.

There are 6 - 256gb 2.5" SSD models for under $100 between Newegg, Amazon, and BestBuy. There are 17 - 240gb 2.5" SSD models for under $100 between the same 3 sites.
 

CRamseyer

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Prices change every day and often several times a day. The Best of Monthly is a snapshot taken at the first of each month.

Less than 12 hours after your comment the 850 EVO products were already back down.

If someone is building a computer for $500 or less then an SSD is often not the best option. I can't recommend drives I haven't tested. I have several models in queue.
 

CRamseyer

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A 7200 RPM HDD on windows 8.1 still boots up in like 5-7 seconds. Any improvement over that from an SSD is negligible. And what other's have said, processing power affects loading times the most.

It isn't just the time it takes to get into Windows but the time it takes to get into Windows and start using it. On a fresh install a HDD can get into Windows pretty fast but after you have the drive 50% full and all of your programs installed it takes significantly longer to get in and start working.

SSDs slow down just like hard drives with more data on them but the performance drop off is not as sharp.
 

Evolution2001

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The prices listed in "Top Value" chart doesn't jive with the price showing for the individual product. I take it that chart is not dynamic content?
In Top Value, it lists the Budget Buy 850 EVO 500GB @ $269.99, but the price that accompanies its review shows $179.99.
I happened to catch this because the "Budget Buy 512GB" was listed as costing MORE than the "Performance Pick 512GB".
 

Evolution2001

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I'm looking on Amazon and I'm seeing that the 840's are selling for more than the 850's. Are the 840's better in any regard? Or are sellers just stuck with old stock of the 840's and don't want to sell them below cost? I was expecting to see the 840's being blown out because of the 850's. Unless the 850's aren't as good as the 840's.

Thoughts?
 


The 850s are better, but because they 840s are no longer in production they become a premium item now? same thing happened with the 780Tis and such after the 980 came out, their price didn't drop they went up actually.
 

LuxZg

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I actually went looking for cheapest ~250GB SSD locally, and it was HyperX Fury 240GB SATA drive (~100€). Then I took a look at PCMark 8 "real-world" storage benchmark I've found on some site, and compared it to numbers from the "wow" category of the likes of SM951 and Intel 750 and was left like... wow... it really is altogether unimportant if I spend 100€ on a drive or 300€ or 500€. If there's money to spend, better spend it to get larger capacity than going for some "higher performance" SSD. I do expect there will be some heavy use(r)s which will show noticeable speedup with more expensive SSDs, but let's face it - 99% of people aren't in that category.

All of that taken in consideration, why doesn't this article just say - "we won't give you charts, just go and buy cheapest you can get with as many GB as you can get!". Ok, you do mention it in article, but why even bother comparing or pushing one model if they'll all basically result in same perceivable performance? :)
 

CRamseyer

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They are not all the same. I guess it's time to put this rumor to bed with some real world latency testing. Give me a couple of weeks to wear some drives and build a workload.

 
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