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-2691492/ssds-money-august-2012.html

 

[Jeffs0418]

Did Samsung lower the warranty on the EVO from 5 to 3 years or is that a major typo?

 

[ErikVinoya]

I'm wondering how the 850 EVO beat the BX100 in the budget 256GB section when it is a whole lot cheaper. Thoughts anyone?

EDIT: Bah... just checked prices in Amazon, and they're 2 bucks parts... If that's the difference in price, then definitely I'd go for the EVO

 

[fastcountach]

why am i seeing 3 different prices for the EVO 850 in the 3 parts of the article. 150, 84 and 110, all from Amazon

 

[CRamseyer]

I'll find out why it now states a 3-year warranty. The 850 EVO has a 5-year warranty.

 

[psycher1]

^ya this amazon price thingo is wacked. It's buggy on every one of the 'best of' articles.

 

[Bartendalot]

When is the successor to the Intel 750 due? Next year should be a big year for storage with octane and XPoint.

 

[Brian_R170]

It's too bad the PCIe budget buy is still double the price of a performance SATA SSD. Hopefully, we'll see a flood of NVMe product announcements at CES.

Not holding by breath for 3D XPoint in a consumer PC product any time soon.

 

[wkwilley2]

why am i seeing 3 different prices for the EVO 850 in the 3 parts of the article. 150, 84 and 110, all from Amazon

Something is definitely wrong there. I can personally vouch for the Sandisk Extreme SSD's in terms of performance, I have a unit that is about 2 years old now and it's still going strong. Although, The Samsung 850 EVO now has better R/W Specs than my Sandisk did back in the day.

 

[WrightWayBiz]

i'm a bit agitated they left off the Intel SSD 750 (NVME) in the 400gb size for $399
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Solid-State-Drive-SSDPEDMW400G4R5-PCI-Express/dp/B00UHJJQAY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447085081&sr=8-1&keywords=intel+nvme

I think this would be a great middle ground NVME intro, especially if you have a newer Mobo that would support the card.

 

[TbsToy]

WrightWayBiz,
Don't be agitated by the 400GB 750 thing, (yeah we love ours too). The Intel 750 is like JBL speakers. The people who know what the best is know what is up!
W.P.

 

[tjfertterer]

Newegg just had the Samsung 850 EVO on sale plus a promotion code to make them $74.99 each. Can't beat that deal so I picked up two of them for a RAID 1 for my new server build.

 

[CRamseyer]

The Intel SSD 750 400GB is a stellar product but I think the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB is a better value. As more products come to market we'll expand the PCIe section into capacity sizes like the SATA drives.

 

[ipwitan]

I wish someone would quantify a real world speed comparison. There is a youtube video that shows the difference between a 5400, 7200, and ssd drive. I would like to add in a gen3x4 ssd for comparison. The video also had some control problems, so I would much rather see the excellent staff of TomsHardware perform the comparison. In any event, the other test showed start time, load time of an application, and shutdown time.

For what its worth, it would be cool to add in the hybrid drives and somehow do a comparison of a real world experience with say a 256 ssd and a 1 tb hardrive using something like Samsung Magic. I cannot tell what it actually does and how much improvement it is making.

Thanks

 

[CRamseyer]

In the SSD reviews we give some results in time to competition. I'm not a big fan of traditional time to desktop and time for shutdown tests because your DLL files play a very large role. When you first build a computer the startup and shutdown time is very fast. Over time, with more software installed the boot time takes longer.

I do have a controlled test environment I could use to run those tests in. I use a notebook to perform the battery life test so it wouldn't be a big deal to add a controlled time to desktop test. Is that something you guys really want to see? When I ran the test in the past the results were almost always within a second of each other as long as the system configuration is optimized.

 

[Ewitte]

We have two local stores that sometimes get some good prices. I got a 250gb evo for about $90 and I've seen the 256GB 950 pro for $179. The 512GB keeps going out of stock.

 

[noaman]

Can any body suggest a good ssd in 120 GB capacity?

 

[CRamseyer]

Can any body suggest a good ssd in 120 GB capacity?

The price difference between a good 128GB SSD and a decent 256GB SSD is very small, within $10 in most cases. You are much better off purchasing an 850 EVO 250GB for $75. Most good 128GB SSDs cost $60-65.

You also have to be very careful in the 128GB capacity size. Now that all of the drives ship with 128Gbit flash there isn't a lot of parallel IO to the flash because there are so few die. The performance is much lower than what you expect. The best options are the SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung 850 Pro.

 

[gbenninger]

I paid $139 for the 480 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro at Best Buy December 28th. Why are the prices so inflated on this chart?

 

[gbenninger]

Bah, it's not an extreme pro.. sorry. It's an Ultra II 480. False alarm. I was about to go buy a second one.

 

[rmiller1959]

I already had a 1 TB Mushkin Reactor SSD, so I bought a 480 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro as my system drive, and I converted the Mushkin into a data drive. It's a great combination!

 

[brainburst]

Does anyone care about reliability? Why isn't that a metric? Some of us need to build systems that are 24 x 7 and don't need awesome write speed, just fast read speed.

 

[jongri]

Samsung 850 Pro SSD is the best performance legacy SATA 3 SSD not the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD. I have both (1TB Samsung 850 Pro & 960GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD's). The 1TB Samsung 850 Pro is hands down faster in both Read MB/s, Write MB/s (using any SSD Benchmarks), much more consistent and overall a much better, larger capacity, better included software package SSD.
The awesome 1TB Samsung 850 Pro only costs a few cents more per GB than the great 960GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD.
Best SATA 3 6GB/s SSD - Samsung 850 Pro ! You pay a few cents more per GB but the Samsung 850 Pro SSD delivers the full
SATA 3 SSD package!