1.8" SSD-what are my options?

[m3ta1head]

I'm not up to date on the 1.8" SSD market-what is the best drive out there circa 2010? I'm looking for a quick, 32gb/64gb PATA/ZIF replacement drive for a Macbook Air...the stock 4200rpm drive is slower than sin.

My budget is sub $200. What is the best drive I can snag for this kind of money?

 

[InvisiBill]

I'm also slightly interested in a PATA SSD, though 2.5" would work for me. If I can find one cheap enough, this could breathe some new life into an older laptop I have. The most popular Google result, the Transcend 32GB, seems to be pretty bad.

And http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=200725:

Enter the Transcend 32GB SSD. I purchased this product hoping that it would greatly increase the performance of my notebook with expectations that it would decrease boot up times and be zippy in all manners of file transfers. It's such a pity that it does none of those things.

Lots of reports of an XP install taking hours.

 

[danman]

I had that Transcend drive in an old laptop. It sucks, stuttering every 5 seconds or so. Browsing the net was impossible.

 

[cafcwest]

I purchased the "Sundream KingSpec 32GB SSD" from Bad-China via eBay a few months ago to upgrade my Latitude D430. In the same boat as you - had to have a 1.8" ZIF drive.

The old Toshiba 80GB drive, according to ATTO, was 25MB read/25MB write.

The KingSpec, again via ATTO, reported 60MB read/40MB write. I strongly suspect this is interface, not drive limited.

Real world performance however, there was very little/almost no noticable improvements with the new drive. I've done SSD installs on two other older laptops (HP TC1100 tablet, Latitude C640) and this was the first one where I felt that I had wasted my time/money.

 

[sub.mesa]

1,8" SSD with high performance would mean you need a real controller, like Intel X18-M; that would give you high IOps performance, but its SATA. You could use a SATA -> PATA converter, it should work though i'm sure it will degrade performance by some degree.