Best SSDs For The Money: January 2012

[acku]

Welcome to the year's first SSD recommendations. We updated our list to reflect recent price drops on second-gen SandForce-based hardware. There are several good deals in the $150-200 range. Prices are falling, so we're letting you know!

Best SSDs For The Money: January 2012 : Read more

 

[compton]

The 830 is a very impressive specimen, and the newer Marvel + Toggle NAND drives are excellent as well. But I want a big plate of Cherryville, and I was hoping the NDA would lift tonight...

The best value in a new drive is probably whichever SF2281 with sync NAND is cheapest, but avoid the 60GB models. The price/performance mix at the 64GB level is the 830. At higher capacities it's a toss-up though.

 

[sincreator]

I think that reliability should be a big factor in all the categories. I've read from numerous sites that the M4 crucial drives and Intel drives are the most reliable, and I also know that the sandforce drives have a firmware update that fixes the issues that once existed. What I don't know and what alot of other people don't know is how reliability stands up between all the drives. Would be interesting to find out though, I guess after 3 or 4 years we'll start finding out.

 

[sincreator]

I almost forgot...Why is it that SSD drives typically only have 3 year warranties, and higher end conventional spinning drives get 5 years? Anyone?

 

[Dacatak]

SuperTalent has been selling a 64GB SSD rated at 540/490 MB/s read/write for under $110 for a while now, yet this is never mentioned for some reason. Shouldn't this take the Samsung 830's position at the $110 mark?

 

[lunyone]

Where does this SSD below fit into the equation?
$130-140 shipped ~$1.16/GB
SanDisk Ultra SDSSDH-120G-G25 2.5" 120GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

[lashabane]

[citation][nom]lunyone[/nom]Where does this SSD below fit into the equation?$130-140 shipped ~$1.16/GBSanDisk Ultra SDSSDH-120G-G25 2.5" 120GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)[/citation]
You should check out their oh so informative video on their website:

sandisk-solid-state-drive

I wasn't able to find any info anywhere in regards to what kind of flash memory it uses so no clue where it would stand in the charts.
Based on size and pricing, I would imagine it being tier 9 or 10

 

[jammur]

Are you sure the crucial m4 256GB is really better than the 240GB OCZ Agility 3. The reads and writes MB/s in your table are both SIGNIFICANTLY lower. So I'm paying ~$60 more for an extra 16GB that are A LOT slower. Is that right?

 

[RealBeast]

[citation][nom]sincreator[/nom]I think that reliability should be a big factor in all the categories. I've read from numerous sites that the M4 crucial drives and Intel drives are the most reliable, and I also know that the sandforce drives have a firmware update that fixes the issues that once existed. What I don't know and what alot of other people don't know is how reliability stands up between all the drives. Would be interesting to find out though, I guess after 3 or 4 years we'll start finding out.[/citation]
The best information that I've found on ssd reliability is a study of a large etailer and its returns (all drives had over 500 sales) and they update the table a couple times a year HERE. Intel and Crucial really stand out in their reliability measure.

 

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

No love for the OCZ Onyx 32GB? Its read performance is about only half as fast as the Kingston 16GB, but the write speed is about the same and has twice as much space.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227510

It also seems to be one of, if not OCZ's most reliable SSD. (all of their other models are under par reliability-wise)

 

[sincreator]

[citation][nom]Realbeast[/nom]The best information that I've found on ssd reliability is a study of a large etailer and its returns (all drives had over 500 sales) and they update the table a couple times a year HERE. Intel and Crucial really stand out in their reliability measure.[/citation]

Thanks for that. Pretty interesting write up for sure. I was really surprised to see Asus motherboards have 4 out of the top 6 returned motherboards, and not just their low end boards either.lol. I also thought that Corsair would of beat out Antec/Thermaltake in the PSU department...I guess not. Either way I guess we have to take those figures with a grain of salt though since it's just information from one e-tail outlet, and not the numbers from the companies themselves. It's not like they would share the real numbers anyway though. haha.

 

[ctbaars]

Get a Tier 1 SSD for the same price as a Teir 3's recommended here. While the sale lasts. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226226

 

[rmpumper]

I don't get it, maybe someone can help:
- why do they label the SSD's differently, i.e. "Performance Boot Drive" or "System Drive (OS + Programs)" - what's the difference in real world? Does that mean that you can't use Samsung 830 for software/games or something?

 

[LukeCWM]

Any word on the SATA 3 replacement?

 

[jaquith]

[citation][nom]LukeCWM[/nom]Any word on the SATA 3 replacement?[/citation]
SATA Express will increase the speeds to 8Gb/s and 16Gb/s. My best guess is 2013 at the earliest.

The 180GB Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F180GBGT-BK has an excellent Cost/GB : Performance, I just ordered a couple the other day.

 

[Onus]

Interesting, Realbeast. As an admitted Antec fanboy, the PSU results don't really surprise me, but WD return rates going up fully explains why they are decreasing their warranty coverage. It looks like they've decided they are no longer interested in my business. Once I start buying drives again, I'll keep it to Samsung and/or Seagate.
Hopefully some Newegg managers are seeing this; I'd love to see something similar done with Newegg return rates (although I suppose that might cost them all or most of their Diablotek and Logisys PSU sales).

 

[josejones]

When will the PCIe SSD Interface support PCIe 3.0?

 

[Guest]

What about OCZ's Octane (with the new firmware)? Not enterprise...

And whether or not the SSDs have native encryption or not is very important - since they can't be erased. This should certainly be included in the chart.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

"When will the PCIe SSD Interface support PCIe 3.0?"

PCI-e 3.0 slots require the use of an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU. Currently there are no Intel Ivy Bridge CPU's. It's going to be a while before the new standard is fully implemented.

 

[Pawessum16]

I'm sorry but with no weight on reliability for these drives, this review makes absolutely no sense. It also doesn't make sense when you give an honorable mention to a drive for mobile use just because it has 2x the write performance when the "performance" drive above it gets 10x better power consumption. I think most of us here know that if you want to buy an SSD, go to Newegg, list the drives in order of rating, and go from there. PS from user reviews I've seen Intel is no longer the holy grail of reliable drives. They're highly overpriced and putting a recommendation on them is questionable (at most honorable mention worthy). I've seen pretty good consistent reviews from other drive makers, and OCZ seems to be consistently the worst in reliability. Then again this all comes from a person with no first hand experience, but from others' experiences, it appears to me.....

 

[deanjo]

Without comparitive benchmarks of the drives with data that can and can't be compressed this article is useless as not everyone's uses for these drives are the same. Someone using it for a boot drive and someone using it for video editting for example have very different requirements.

 

[Tanquen]

[citation][nom]jammur[/nom]Are you sure the crucial m4 256GB is really better than the 240GB OCZ Agility 3. The reads and writes MB/s in your table are both SIGNIFICANTLY lower. So I'm paying ~$60 more for an extra 16GB that are A LOT slower. Is that right?[/citation]

Same here, why don't they tell you why the seemingly lower performing drive is the Performance drive option?

 

[elidril]

Where's the Corsair Force Series GT 90Gb???

 

[__-_-_-__]

[citation][nom]josejones[/nom]When will the PCIe SSD Interface support PCIe 3.0?[/citation]
it doesn't matter. current pci-e SSD's can't even saturate PCI-E 2.0 x4.
A pci-e 3.0 SSD would perform just the same in a pci-e 2.0 slot.

 

[sincreator]

[citation][nom]Tanquen[/nom]Same here, why don't they tell you why the seemingly lower performing drive is the Performance drive option?[/citation]

I would guess they would of gone one way or another if quality was a factor with the price difference. It's the only reason that I can see that would make sense, but they said it was because of user accessible space that swayed their decesion. I don't know there seems to be something missing from the equation.

Maybe it was the fact that the latest firmware update for the M4's raised it's performance quite a bit:
http://thessdreview.com/latest-buzz/crucial-m4-ssd-firmware-update-0009-posted-tests-display-definite-performance-increase/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/crucial-m4-ssd-firmware-update,13314.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2011/09/08/crucial-m4-vs-vertex-3-new-firmware-face-of/5

EDIT: Actually the firware update is pretty old news now and the performance listed in this review/article is off from what I can tell from the links. They say in the article that the M4 gets:
Sequential Read 415 MB/s
Sequential Write 260 MB/s

But it supposed to be more along
Sequential Read 526MB/s
Sequential Write 274 MB/s

(from the ATTO benchmark on the bit-tech link.)