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SSD for OS/programs - what to get?

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Flogger23m

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Jun 19, 2009
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I am looking into buying an SSD to use as an OS drive and to put some programs onto. I would prefer at least 128GB. I know nothing about which SSD brands and models are good and which are bad. I am looking for reliability (3 years at least, but looking at 5 years of use). Any recommendations?
 
I'm partial to Crucial and Intel. But I hear Kingston isn't bad and has a good price point.
 
I will look into those brands and find which is the cheapest per GB. Thanks for the help.
 
I agree with Chrisroman on brands I have both brands and they've been solid. 120G is a good all around size these days. (I'm anti OCZ after their tricks with the NANDS a year of so ago.)

One question is do you have a SATAIII or SATAII, both are on the market, it'll depend on your motherboard. That will affect speed and cost. If you have a SATAIII connection, that is certainly the way I would go.
 
I only have SATA II, but I may have to upgrade my motherboard for other reasons. If that is the case I am sure it will have SATA III (the board will have to be AM3 or 3+).
 
I'm curious to know if anyone else thinks the new Samsung 830 series SSD's are worth mentioning here. They are pretty new to the market. I bought one for myself and one for a client (after my own good experience with the drive), and they are wicked fast. My mobo only has SATA II (3.0Gbps) so I can't verify the drive's full potential, but it seems to have higher advertised speeds and IOPS than the Crucial M4's.
 
Yeah, the Samsung 830s are normally mentioned in the same sentence with the Crucial M4s, actually. A couple reports of slow performance after heavy workloads starting to surface (one guy here, and a couple at xtremesystems), but so far they seem pretty good.
 
I'm using an Intel 320 series 160GB in my desktop and a Crucial C300 128GB in my laptop. Both are great so far. While the crucial is supposed to be a bit faster, I doubt the difference is noticeable in real world use (in fact my desktop system feels significantly faster, but that's probably because the rest of the specs are much higher). For the laptop, I would've bought an M4, but they don't make it in the 1.8" form factor (or at least I couldn't find one).

Main reason I went with the 320 in my desktop was because I needed something larger than 128GB, and couldn't afford any of the 256GB drives (+ Intel's reliability record is pretty good)
 
Intel 320's are the only SSDs from a major company with a 5 year warranty. All the other drives have 3 years. Of course they are a bit slower than the latest Crucial or Samsung models but it's hardly noticeable in everyday use.
 
Xeth said:
Intel 320's are the only SSDs from a major company with a 5 year warranty. All the other drives have 3 years.
Click to expand...
I got a 2 year extended warranty with my Samsung 830 for $14.99. I thought it would be 2 years through newegg, after the manufacturer's 3 year warranty expired... BUT..I just spoke to a newegg rep yesterday and they said it actually is 2 years additional MANUFACTURER's warranty. Not too bad for $14.99. In case anyone cares :p

Probably a little bit overkill for a $100 hard drive.
 
Benny Blanco said:
I got a 2 year extended warranty with my Samsung 830 for $14.99. I thought it would be 2 years through newegg, after the manufacturer's 3 year warranty expired... BUT..I just spoke to a newegg rep yesterday and they said it actually is 2 years additional MANUFACTURER's warranty. Not too bad for $14.99. In case anyone cares :p

Probably a little bit overkill for a $100 hard drive.
Click to expand...

Hmm I wonder if I can get that through Samsung directly. I bought my drive from Microcenter.
 
jatwell said:
What about this? Thinking of trying one out.

Supposedly Storage Review said it would give SSD performance over a whole 2TB drive. Need Windows 7 for it though.

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technolog...HO66/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325390293&sr=8-1
Click to expand...

It's a good option but definitely not as fast as a real SSD. Also there's horror stories floating around about unclean shutdowns causing the cache to rebuild itself and making the computer unusable for hours.

If I were to do caching I would just get a Z68 motherboard instead and use Intel SRT. I trust Intel a lot more than OCZ...
 
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