Time To Upgrade: 10 SSDs Between 240 And 256 GB, Rounded Up

[JOSHSKORN]

I want a new computer so bad but I keep wanting to wait longer and longer. My main priority is to outdue the next generation of consoles AND to be able to have a large enough SSD. I think I'm done with HDD, except for data storage. Hopefully they'll start mass producing 1 TB SSDs soon.

 

[LordConrad]

For my money, I'll stay with the Mushkin Chronos and Chronos Deluxe. They have the best performance/price I've found to date.

 

[frankworm]

Not one mention of a SSD cache for a 1TB to 3TB HDD.


My Crucial Adrenaline caches my 1TB Samsung atm and gives it performance greater than my 120GB Intel 320 series and almost equal performance to my Crucial M4 64GB.

Just bought a 2TB 7200rpm for $69.99 (cost of adrenaline was $99 when I adopted the new tech) so for <$180 I have 2TB of SSD performance.

I guess I am just a hipster.

 

[jaideep1337]

I still think a 60gig agility 3 is all you need

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]JOSHSKORN[/nom]I want a new computer so bad but I keep wanting to wait longer and longer. My main priority is to outdue the next generation of consoles AND to be able to have a large enough SSD. I think I'm done with HDD, except for data storage. Hopefully they'll start mass producing 1 TB SSDs soon.[/citation]

There are 1 TB SSDs, but most of them are around $2000. You're better off putting two 512 GB SSDs in RAID0.

 

[acku]

[citation][nom]techcurious[/nom]Why is it that Kingston SSDs get almost no coverage here at Toms? Kingston has been selling various SSDs ever since the early days of SSD technology, and yet it gets ignored while more "exotic" SSD brands like Monster (and to some extent PNY) gets coverage.. I have yet to see Tomshardware review a single Kingston HyperX SSD (and possibly any of the older ones either). In fact, so lacking is their relationship with Kingston HyperX, that they fail to even know much about them.. I had to point out an error in three consecutive Best SSDs For The Money installments that claimed the Kingston HyperX (non 3K) uses Toggle Nand, while the Kingston website clearly stated that both the regular and 3K HyperX drives use Synchronous Nand. (Toms has finally stopped making that mistake). Why Toms? What is it that is keeping you from reviewing Kingston HyperX SSD?[/citation]

We addressed the mistake. As it stands, there is nothing that separates one SF from other. The same technology is at play, and the firmware comes supplied by SF. This is the blackbox part that cannot be changed by the vendor.

Second, this is a showcase article, not really a roundup. It was intended to give attention to vendors we hadn't in the past. We already gave Kingston due attention in our 60 GB SandForce roundup.

 

[ram1009]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]get the cheapest, biggest you possibly can. Benchmarks exaggerate the difference between SSD's.[/citation]

Biggest, cheapest, fastest. Are you sure you aren't talking about sex? Where does reliability enter into your equation...or does it?

 

[ram1009]

Sounds to me like Tom's is trying to "spread the love" here.

 

[mapesdhs]

Some info for what it's worth, I've been using OCZ drives for a while, been very happy so far; I
have V2E, V3, V4, various capacities. However, as part of building a 3930K setup for a friend for
use with After Effects, I recently bought a Samsung 830 256GB and I have to say I'm very
impressed. After doing a full Win7 install, the 830 showed a totally smooth performance profile in
HDTach, more than 400MB/sec right across the range of the test. None of the OCZ models I've
tested have ever maintained performance like this. As a result, I changed the 2nd drive (for
the AE cache) from an OCZ 120GB MAX IOPS to another Samsung 830 256GB (persuaded my
friend the extra cost was worth it).

I do like OCZ drives, especially the V2E series for systems that do not support TRIM (ie. UNIX
machines), but the Samsung really is rather good (it was 130 UKP total from ebuyer).

Ian.

 

[clownbaby]

10 SSDs and nothing from Intel or OCZ?

 

[mapesdhs]

As the article said, this was more about brands which don't get mentioned so often. It's easy to find the
relevant performance data for existing Intel/OCZ models, just read earlier reviews, etc.

Ian.

 

[LORD_ORION]

If it doesn't have a 5 year warranty, it is crap.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Tanquen[/nom]Yea, it’s getting a little out of hand. For 90% of the things 90% of people do on their PC, 200MBs+ read and write speeds just don’t mean much. There are too many other bottle necks going on. I messed around with a RAM drive using most of my 64GB of RAM and the read and write speeds are fun to test (4000MBs or so) but games and VMware sessions I launched from the RAM disc saw no noticeable improvement in launch times or anything else. Same goes for my 830 SSD drive. It’s fast but games and software I use for SCADA development just don’t see any real benefit. They are cool if you want to open 10 sessions of MS Word and 15 Internet Explorer and a bunch of other stuff at the same time but if you just open one instance of Excel and use it and the Photo Shop and use it and then a web browser and use it, you’ll never really see the difference. You have to benchmark it or have two PCs setting right next to each other to see that something started or saved a split second faster.At least with my 64GB of RAM and actually get 64GB of RAM unlike HDs and SSDs.[/citation]

Actually, with 64GB or RAM, you do not get 64GB, you get 64GiB. A 1TB hard drive is truly a 1TB drive. Windows counts GiB as GB which is wrong according to the current SI units.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]As the article said, this was more about brands which don't get mentioned so often. It's easy to find therelevant performance data for existing Intel/OCZ models, just read earlier reviews, etc.Ian.[/citation]

Earlier reviews don't keep up with OCZ's firmware updates. With how mcuh OCZ can improve with some of their updates, that doesn't give a very accurate portrayal of OCZ's current performance and such because of that. It also doesn't clue in on fixed bugs and new bugs.

 

[spookyman]

What no Crucial, Intel or Samsung drives? What are they afraid of?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]spookyman[/nom]What no Crucial, Intel or Samsung drives? What are they afraid of?[/citation]

How many times does it need to be said that this was an article intended to mostly give some attention to brands that aren't given much attention by Tom's in most other SSD articles? Crucial, Intel, and Samsung are often given a lot of attention, especially Samsung and Intel.

 

[MC_K7]

I'm glad they're reviewing 240 to 256 GB I'm looking to acquire my first SSD and that's the size I'm aiming for so this will give me more options. I read an excellent review on the new Plextor M5P and I think it would be my choice. I was also considering Intel and Samsung, but unfortunately none of these 3 brands are in the review. Yeah I don't mind paying a little more for quality. What do you guys think? Any suggestions?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]MC_K7[/nom]I'm glad they're reviewing 240 to 256 GB I'm looking to acquire my first SSD and that's the size I'm aiming for so this will give me more options. I read an excellent review on the new Plextor M5P and I think it would be my choice. I was also considering Intel and Samsung, but unfortunately none of these 3 brands are in the review. Yeah I don't mind paying a little more for quality. What do you guys think? Any suggestions?[/citation]

Samsung doesn't have inferior to quality to Plextor overall AFAIK. Intel is also incredibly high-quality overall, although I wouldn't buy their newer drives strictly because fo the SandForce controller(s) used by them. IDK about pricing per GB for M5P, but if it's close to Samsung 840 Pro, then I'd go for the 840 Pro over M5P.

 

[Mhawk13]

[citation][nom]Tanquen[/nom]Yea, it’s getting a little out of hand. For 90% of the things 90% of people do on their PC, 200MBs+ read and write speeds just don’t mean much. There are too many other bottle necks going on. I messed around with a RAM drive using most of my 64GB of RAM and the read and write speeds are fun to test (4000MBs or so) but games and VMware sessions I launched from the RAM disc saw no noticeable improvement in launch times or anything else. Same goes for my 830 SSD drive. It’s fast but games and software I use for SCADA development just don’t see any real benefit. They are cool if you want to open 10 sessions of MS Word and 15 Internet Explorer and a bunch of other stuff at the same time but if you just open one instance of Excel and use it and the Photo Shop and use it and then a web browser and use it, you’ll never really see the difference. You have to benchmark it or have two PCs setting right next to each other to see that something started or saved a split second faster.At least with my 64GB of RAM and actually get 64GB of RAM unlike HDs and SSDs.[/citation]
Some games just have crappy coding. Have you tried playing World of Warcraft from a ramdisk? It should be lightning fast.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Tanquen[/nom]I could not disagree more. Once the system is up and running (from a “Fast” SSD), most of what is needed or running is in RAM already. There may be some minor page file (was also in RAM) activity and a few DLLs on the system drive but that would not make that much difference. It would be an interesting test though. In windows system performance you could graph the all the drives activities and see how much the system drive is accessed when you launch a program and it saved files from another drive. But I don’t know an easy way to install the OS on a RAM disk and then launch from it to test so…[/citation]

Bandwidth is not the main point of an SSD, latency is. An SSD's low latency lets it have huge random throughput and gives a much smoother experience. Even for gaming which is mostly not bound by storage in most examples, things such as much faster loading time can be huge advantages (I've heard stories of people who can load into a server in a multi-player game so much faster than everyone else that they can almost win many capture the flag games before anyone else can get into the map unless the server's moderators kill that someone at the beginning of the game) and also make things such as menus and such load much faster, possibly other sorts of advantages or at least greater convenience by itself.

Also, simply having an SSD can give you incredible boot times in the single digits of seconds or near them instead of high double or triple digits as well as make everything, such as office programs and more, load incredibly fast. The advantage is arguably mere convenience, but it could be a decent boost in productivity if everything works much more smoothly and thus not mere convenience and otherwise minor improvements. Anyone who has an SSD might not at first notice the improvements if they're not looking for them, but going back to a single hard drive setup can show it to great effect when everything that was loading instantly not takes several seconds or more to work the same way.

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]MC_K7[/nom]... I was also considering Intel and Samsung, but unfortunately none of these 3 brands are in the review. Yeah I don't mind paying a little more for quality. What do you guys think? Any suggestions?[/citation]

All the comparable performance data you need for Intel/Samsung can be found in earlier reviews, or the charts, etc.

For quality, both Intel & Samsung have strong reputations. Definitely good choices for reliability from everything I read,
and you'd be more than happy with a 256GB Samsung 830 IMO.

Ian.

 

[JonnyDough]

Samsung 840 Pro is the best SSD out there right now. Not necessarily the best price, but the top when it comes to performance and energy usage.

 

[JonnyDough]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]How many times does it need to be said that this was an article intended to mostly give some attention to brands that aren't given much attention by Tom's in most other SSD articles? Crucial, Intel, and Samsung are often given a lot of attention, especially Samsung and Intel.[/citation]

As Crucial should. It's an American company.

 

[jonjonjon]

some of the graphs are really hard to read without sitting there and staring at them. some use dotted lines for incompressible data. other graphs like the sandisk one use the same colors and dotted lines to differentiate 4kn and 128kb of the same data type. this means compressible data could be a dotted line. both 4kb should be red with incompressible data having a dotted line. same for 128kb but green. reads should also be distinguishable at a glance without using dotted lines that i expect to mean incompressible data. imo graphs should be used so you can quickly glance and get an idea of performance. if you have to match every line type to the key it becomes less useful.

 

[brimur]

Shame the Sanddisk Extreme was tested with R201 and not R211 which boosted write speeds in 4K by up to 100MBs