Help with choosing an SSD?

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DaRuSsIaMaN

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apr 22, 2007
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Tom's Hardware has the summer roundup article comparing 17 SSDs. But that's from half a year ago, and, from what I understand, quite a number of new and improved drives have been released since then. So any recommendations on how to make my choice? Anyone know of any recent SSD roundups from other sites, so that I can compare? Or do you know of any specific drive you recommend?

I am looking for roughly 128 GB capacity. I don't play games much, except a little bit occasionally, so that's not a huge concern. I just want great performance in boot and load times and in "ordinary" computer tasks to enhance productivity... sorry about the vagueness lol. Low(er) power consumption is also a plus. I do not plan on doing RAID. And I can afford to spend a decent amount of $, so I do want something better than entry-level for sure, just not anything really high end. I'm building a Sandy Bridge-based system, so I will be able to use any drive with SATA 6 Gb/s interface.

Also, when is the next generation of SandForce controller coming out? In the summer roundup it was the 1200. I read somewhere some time ago that SandForce 1800 or 2000 or some other number -- something newer at any rate -- was coming out soon.

Thanks!
 
I have been doing a lot of reading myself on which SSD to buy. If you are looking for a 6gb/s drive only ones now are the crucial c300 which does very well and is currently the fastest drive. Now if you can wait a month or two the C400 will be which will be even better, and even Intel's 3rd gen drives willing be coming out soon as well. I recommend reading this C300 review.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=261789


New SSD

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4086/microns-realssd-c400-uses-25nm-nand-at-161gb-offers-415mbs-reads

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3971/sandforce-announces-nextgen-ssd-controller-sf2000-capable-of-500mbs-and-60k-iops

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3965/intels-3rd-generation-x25m-ssd-specs-revealed
 
For quality and support, Intel gets my vote even if they don't always put up the highest synthetic benches that don't matter in real world use anyway. ;)
 
I can say from experience that the Intel drives work well and the SSD toolbox software is very good. If I were to buy a drive today it would be a C300 or wait for the C400.
 
Thanks for those links. I'm really annoyed, though, that the C300 suffers so much in write speed when you go down from the 256GB model. Wtf? I don't want to shell out for the 256 model because I simply don't need that much space. Having an OS partition plus space for a few games is enough, and for the rest I'll use some "green" traditional HDD. In the way of performance, the c300 256gb seems perfect, but I'm not paying THAT much. For reference, here's what I'm looking at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-470-sandforce-best-ssd,2783-11.html
The 256 gb model is still slower at write than a number of others but not substantially. Compare that with the 128 or even 64 models... ugh.

I guess I can see how write speed will not be nearly as important as read... it's just kind of annoying nonetheless ... hmm.



And thanks for those links on the upcoming new SSDs. I want the C400 but don't think I can wait another month. Patience is really thin already with getting this build together...
 
Ok so just how important is the write performance? What kind of computer operations -- that are not immediately obvious -- would be affected by write performance? Installing things obviously uses writing ... but what other, less obvious, examples? What about during browsing? FF caches all your tabs and history so you can restore everything, for instance. So that must require writing, but would the writing speed actually make a difference in performance? Since it's done in the background, maybe it wouldn't matter anyway? Anyone know good examples when write performance would make a difference to me, other than installing things or copying files?

Also, which benchmarks are most relevant? 4k random reads/writes, 512k random reads/writes, or sequential throughput?
 
DaRuSsIaMaN said:
Ok so just how important is the write performance? What kind of computer operations -- that are not immediately obvious -- would be affected by write performance? Installing things obviously uses writing ... but what other, less obvious, examples? What about during browsing? FF caches all your tabs and history so you can restore everything, for instance. So that must require writing, but would the writing speed actually make a difference in performance? Since it's done in the background, maybe it wouldn't matter anyway? Anyone know good examples when write performance would make a difference to me, other than installing things or copying files?

Also, which benchmarks are most relevant? 4k random reads/writes, 512k random reads/writes, or sequential throughput?
Click to expand...

Don't get so hung up on numbers that you drive yourself insane.

At this point, buying any major name SSD is going to be so much quicker than your HD that you're going to be thrilled no matter what. Hemming and hawing over a few MB/s here and there isn't worth the stress IMHO unless you just have to have the absolute "best".

Just choose a brand you trust and go for it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one once you have it. :D
 
DaRuSsIaMaN said:
Ok so just how important is the write performance? What kind of computer operations -- that are not immediately obvious -- would be affected by write performance? Installing things obviously uses writing ... but what other, less obvious, examples? What about during browsing? FF caches all your tabs and history so you can restore everything, for instance. So that must require writing, but would the writing speed actually make a difference in performance? Since it's done in the background, maybe it wouldn't matter anyway? Anyone know good examples when write performance would make a difference to me, other than installing things or copying files?

Also, which benchmarks are most relevant? 4k random reads/writes, 512k random reads/writes, or sequential throughput?
Click to expand...
4K random reads are usually the most relevant because they're what your computer will do when booting up Windows and loading software and for example game levels into memory. Sequential throughput is only relevant when copying and extracting (which might be CPU-limited anyway) files and installing software. Random writes come into play when you or the OS move or erase data, and will of course determine how fast you save data to disk. I can't come up with anything specific in which random writes will have a noticeable effect on performance other than what you have already said, caching. But if you don't have a very large amount of memory (at least 8 GB) and leave the page file on for that reason, then the write speed of your SSD is of course still the bottle neck in the data transfer between the memory and disk storage.

I think for most people random 4K reads are the most important number to look at, and Intel is traditionally strongest in that area.
 
Limahl said:
Don't get so hung up on numbers that you drive yourself insane.

At this point, buying any major name SSD is going to be so much quicker than your HD that you're going to be thrilled no matter what. Hemming and hawing over a few MB/s here and there isn't worth the stress IMHO unless you just have to have the absolute "best".

Just choose a brand you trust and go for it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one once you have it. :D
Click to expand...



This is the philosophy I went with buying the cheapest Sandforce drive I could find just before xmas. It is a OCZ 64GB. There are performance issues using a new SSF drive with an old unsupported mother board, but for $80 it was one of the biggest upgrade I have ever seen, and I've been building computers for over a decade. Comparable to when we went from P4 to C2D, maybe bigger.
 
eric91 said:
4K random reads are usually the most relevant because they're what your computer will do when booting up Windows and loading software and for example game levels into memory. Sequential throughput is only relevant when copying and extracting (which might be CPU-limited anyway) files and installing software. Random writes come into play when you or the OS move or erase data, and will of course determine how fast you save data to disk. I can't come up with anything specific in which random writes will have a noticeable effect on performance other than what you have already said, caching. But if you don't have a very large amount of memory (at least 8 GB) and leave the page file on for that reason, then the write speed of your SSD is of course still the bottle neck in the data transfer between the memory and disk storage.

I think for most people random 4K reads are the most important number to look at, and Intel is traditionally strongest in that area.
Click to expand...

Great, thanks. Yeah, the importance of focusing on the random read & write is what I got out of reading anandtech as well. But I can see how the read would be the single most important one.


Limahl said:
Don't get so hung up on numbers that you drive yourself insane.

At this point, buying any major name SSD is going to be so much quicker than your HD that you're going to be thrilled no matter what. Hemming and hawing over a few MB/s here and there isn't worth the stress IMHO unless you just have to have the absolute "best".

Just choose a brand you trust and go for it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one once you have it. :D
Click to expand...

And yes, this is good advice also lol. :) I'm completely done researching it now. I read some reviews by anandtech, and I'm basically set on getting a OCZ vertex 2 or the next generation of intel drive. I'm forced to wait now for my paychecks so I will see if the next intel drives are out and how good they are by the time I'm ready.

I think the C300 series is not worth the extra cost, and the C400 will probably likewise not be worth it for me.
 
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