SSD's, SATA III and Intel relibility

Meganano

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Feb 22, 2011
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I recently built a new rig based on the Intel Core 5-2500k and Asus P8P67 Pro MB. Now I'm thinking of adding an 120 MB SSD for the following reasons.

1. Faster opening of applications
2. Ease of restoring the OS when it gets corrupted since my data files will be on a different drive.

Since the MB has SATA III ports it would seem like a waste to go with less than a SATA III SSD. (I'm looking at read and write speeds of >500 MB/s on the OCZ Vertex 3) However from what I've read it sounds like SATA III SSD's might have some problems yet to be ironed out (e.g. the recent recall on Corsair Force Series 3). I'm not sure whether these read and write speeds scale to real world performance.

I hear a lot of praise for Intel SSD's for reliability, but it sounds like with Intel you sacrifice speed and affordability for reliability. (Intel 510 spec is only 450 MB/s read 210 write and costs 37% more than the OCZ Vertex 3) . In my experience hard disks are the most failure prone component component in a PC. If SSD's are more failure prone than HD's Intel might be a prudent sacrifice.

 
Don't forget that transfer rate isn't the only way to judge disc performance - access time is also important. In fact SSDs get most of their speed benefit from the fact that their access times are literally 100 times faster than that of a hard drive.