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SSD choices

S

speedlever

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 29, 2006
Messages
447
My Intel X25-M (80GB SSD) is simply too small for my OS and programs drive. There are simply too many programs that don't give me the option to set them up and direct the data files to my storage drives. Ergo, the little 80GB drive ends up with under 5GB free space all too often and I have to go in and try to clean it out.

Lately, my system has been unstable (Win 7x64 home premium). (full specs in my sig) It will run fine in safe mode, but crashes when my desktop loads on my account. It runs for a while on my wife's account but will eventually freeze. Also, my esata drive has not been recognized for a long time and I need to fix that too.

So it's time for some upgrades. I figure it will be easier to rework the system than chasing errant drivers.

I plan to put Win8.1 pro x64 on a new SSD and am considering the following:
250GB Samsung 840 EVO for ~$130
256GB Samsung 840 Pro for ~$158
256GB Samsung 850 Pro for ~$197
500GB Samsung 840 EVO for ~$238

I know Crucial has power loss protection on the MX100 series, but I have a pretty good UPS.

My PC pretty much runs 24/7 for normal household duty. No gaming, but videos, email, web browsing, some Sketchup, etc.

I wish that 500GB EVO was inside the 850Pro on price. That would likely be the value leader.

Any of these will be an improvement over my x25-m. Any suggestions on the choices (or other options) above?
 
You will notice no difference in speed between any of your choices.

If you want really long-term usage, then larger capacity will matter more than anything else.

I see the Crucial MX100 512GB on amazon for $210, and the Crucial M550 512GB for $226.
 
Thanks.

I would really like that 500GB 840 EVO, but the price is just too high. Putting these on the Anandtech bench comparator, I think the 840 Pro 256GB will be my choice... and mainly for the 5 year warranty over the 840 EVO 256GB 3 year warranty. I figure that might be worth the ~$28 difference. I don't see any practical performance advantage, based on bench results.

Edit: reading about the Micron M600, I find that the power loss protection touted by Crucial is not full power-loss protection.
"the M500, M550 and MX100 do not have power-loss protection -- what they have is circuitry that protects against corruption of existing data in the case of a power-loss."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8528/micron-m600-128gb-256gb-1tb-ssd-review-nda-placeholder

Edit 2: Amazon pulled their trick of jacking up the price of something I've been looking at on their site. The 840 Pro 256GB just went up $2. Hah.
 
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I just ordered an 840 EVO 1TB. I still think it is the best compromise for a 1TB SSD.
I may have a read performance bug right now, but the fix is incoming.
If Samsung fails to fix it, I will just send it back.
 
As was stated above, you will not notice a difference in any of those drives on day to day usage. The responsiveness of SSDs does not come from the high sequential numbers, it comes from the near zero access times, and to a limited degree, random numbers. I would pick larger capacity over speed.
 
If you haven't made a purchase yet, consider the MX100 512GB if you're after (relatively) cheap capacity.
 
I put the MX100 in the comparators. It didn't look bad at all. But some of the reviews I read were not favorable. Of course I don't have links for that at hand.

I looked at a bunch of SSDs in the comparators. In my usage, I'll bet most any would be satisfactory. I really wanted a 512GB drive since I'm thinking some of the issues I currently have may be related to running the 80GB drive at 95% capacity for lengthy periods of time. The responsiveness might be restored by a secure erase.

Smart details on it show 7.5TB of host writes and the media wear indicator is at 98%. That's pretty darn good to my thinking. But this drive is just too small. I thought it would work as it replaced a 74GB WD raptor spinner... of which I had 2 failures inside of 12 months.

This mobo is getting long in the tooth too. It might also be time to consider replacing it and moving my i5-2500k and ram to another board. I suppose if I do that, I should make that change while I'm setting up the new SSD. Hmm. Hadn't really planned on a mobo swap at this point.
 
Sure, if you're not concerned about costs, pick both capacity and speed. But if you are worried about costs and want the most value, get the cheaper, large capacity drives.
 
I go for long warranty myself as most modern SSD are nearly identical for every-day usage as well as gaming. I just installed 2x512gb MX100s after yanking an 840 Pro out due to capacity. Performance/Price the MX100 seemed best bang for buck. But I also still have Samsung 830 and Intel 520 drives in service, and 2x80gb G2s I just yanked out still going strong.
 
ToddW2 said:
I go for long warranty myself as most modern SSD are nearly identical for every-day usage as well as gaming. I just installed 2x512gb MX100s after yanking an 840 Pro out due to capacity. Performance/Price the MX100 seemed best bang for buck. But I also still have Samsung 830 and Intel 520 drives in service, and 2x80gb G2s I just yanked out still going strong.
Click to expand...

Were 2x 512GB MX100 cheaper than a 1 TB 840 EVO? I hesitated first, but the service time/write latency of the Crucial SSDs is significantly lower than the Samsungs, so went for the EVO in the end. The 1 TB version was also cheaper per GB than the 512GB MX100
 
I'm finding that with the 840 EVO 1TB drives deleting is extremely slow. I had no trouble with any other type of SSD, only these. It takes more time to delete a file than it took copying it. On 830, and 840 PRO drives deleting is almost instantaneous.

But this is probably no concern for general use.
 
M76 said:
I'm finding that with the 840 EVO 1TB drives deleting is extremely slow.
Click to expand...

Could this be related to the old data performance bug? The drive itself has no concept of files or their deletion, so this could be that reading old metadata is slow.
Another explanation could be that TRIM commands caused by deletes are slow and block other accesses. I don't plan to use TRIM with my drive, just provision it to 960GB.
 
M76 said:
I'm finding that with the 840 EVO 1TB drives deleting is extremely slow. I had no trouble with any other type of SSD, only these. It takes more time to delete a file than it took copying it. On 830, and 840 PRO drives deleting is almost instantaneous.

But this is probably no concern for general use.
Click to expand...

Is this on windows? If so then that's just windows being windows with it's deletes.

Drop to a command line with cygwin installed and anything goes away nearly instantly when you do "rm -rf <directory>"
 
omniscence said:
Were 2x 512GB MX100 cheaper than a 1 TB 840 EVO? I hesitated first, but the service time/write latency of the Crucial SSDs is significantly lower than the Samsungs, so went for the EVO in the end. The 1 TB version was also cheaper per GB than the 512GB MX100
Click to expand...

The EVO has/had problems; I had a 256gb I sent back a couple weeks ago because I didn't want to deal with that headache and it was still within return window to Amazon.
 
M76 said:
I'm finding that with the 840 EVO 1TB drives deleting is extremely slow. I had no trouble with any other type of SSD, only these. It takes more time to delete a file than it took copying it. On 830, and 840 PRO drives deleting is almost instantaneous.

But this is probably no concern for general use.
Click to expand...

FnordMan said:
Is this on windows? If so then that's just windows being windows with it's deletes.

Drop to a command line with cygwin installed and anything goes away nearly instantly when you do "rm -rf <directory>"
Click to expand...

Could this have to do with search indexing updating too?

I was getting severe lag to my DOWNLOAD directory until I disabled a few indexing/search things, I forget what now exactly, sorry.
 
ToddW2 said:
Could this have to do with search indexing updating too?

I was getting severe lag to my DOWNLOAD directory until I disabled a few indexing/search things, I forget what now exactly, sorry.
Click to expand...

No it only happens with 840 EVO drives. I used 830 drives before and they worked on the same computers, under the same conditions.. But since we upgraded to 840 EVOs all went to hell. Overall performance is much worse.

These EVO drives are optimized for very little data migration, and we do 1-2TB Writes/deletes on them daily. EVO drives don't like this very much it seems.

It seems to have some connection to TRIM, because if I connect the drives to an older controller with no trim support it deletes files faster.
 
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The 840 EVO could be a candidate for batched trim over online trim.
I don't know if you can disable the trim-on-delete in Windows without also disabling the batched trim (aka drive optimizer).

It also is one of the first drives that supports queued trim (SATA 3.1).
But I don't think Windows 8.1 supports that or ever will. Maybe we have to wait for Windows 9?
 
M76 said:
No it only happens with 840 EVO drives. I used 830 drives before and they worked on the same computers, under the same conditions.. But since we upgraded to 840 EVOs all went to hell. Overall performance is much worse.

These EVO drives are optimized for very little data migration, and we do 1-2TB Writes/deletes on them daily. EVO drives don't like this very much it seems.

It seems to have some connection to TRIM, because if I connect the drives to an older controller with no trim support it deletes files faster.
Click to expand...

The 830s have a great rep for that, I've used them for that in the past, and many other server / host / providers use them too. They've shown to be great in server on the cheap.
 
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