SSD - what to buy for programs/boot drive?

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Flogger23m

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Jun 19, 2009
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Hello,

I am looking for an SSD, most likely a 240GB due to price concerns and I am not interested in buying less than that. It will be used as a program drive for some games until I find the time to do a complete reinstall of Windows in which case it will become my OS drive.

Overall what is the best drive for the money? And which drive is the most reliable? I am not really sure what to look for in regards to SSD specs so any help there would be appreciated.
 
Depending on where you live and on the price, the Crucial M4/M500, Samsung 840 Evo and the cheaper Intels seem to tick all the boxes.

I have the M4, 840 Evo and 840 Pro. No issues.
 
Samsung 840 Pro for speed and reliability.
The 840 EVO is almost as quick but will wear slightly faster than the pro due to different type of memory.
It should still last a long time unless you abuse it.

Very highly rated.
 
Samsung 840 EVO or 840 Pro depending on your price range. Everything else is bust.
 
I've seen the M500s (240GB) and I believe the Samsung EVOs (250GB) go for $150 as of late. $140-150 is my price range (before tax).

It looks like the Pros are out of my price range. Between the M500 and EVO, what is better?
 
As far as reliability goes, I can only speak for Crucial products. I currently have two of them,
128GB SATA V3, (6Gb/s) and 512GB SATA V3 (6Gb/s)

The 128 is the older one, well over two years now, and serves as system disk and holds my game of choice, Star Trek Online.

The 512 is about 1.5 years old, and is installed in the HDD bay of my MacBook (2008 model, I think, it is Unibody with expresscard/34 and Core2 Duo) Pro 256 for mavericks 256 for bootcamp. (the optical drive has been replaced with an OWC data doubler with a 750 GB spinning drive.

I went with Crucial for the 128 because I wanted to build a gaming rig for performance, and they were the first to have SATA V3 SSD's

I got the 512 for the Mac because I had zero complaints about the 128, and figured spending several hundred on the SSD, I could easily keep using my existing MacBook Pro for another 3 or more years. (so far, so good on that count.) because a MBP Retina was too expensive for a big enough SSD, and I figured if they were still selling MPBs with optical and 2.5 inch drives, I could move the ssd (and possibly also the 750) to the new one, if and when that time came.
 
Thanks for the help everyone. I think I have decided on the 240GB Crucial M500. It is about $15 cheaper than the Samsung Evo 250GB. Though, maybe the extra $15 or so might be worth it for 9GB or so extra space? :p

Edit: Looks like the M500 has about half the write speed, at 250MB/S whereas the 840 Evo has 520MB/S. Unless I am missing something, doesn't think make the Samsung Evo a considerably better drive?
 
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Looks like the M500 has about half the write speed, at 250MB/S whereas the 840 Evo has 520MB/S. Unless I am missing something, doesn't think make the Samsung Evo a considerably better drive?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Remember these numbers are large sequential writes (which rarely happens in most real world applications).
 
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Flogger23m said:
Thanks for the help everyone. I think I have decided on the 240GB Crucial M500. It is about $15 cheaper than the Samsung Evo 250GB. Though, maybe the extra $15 or so might be worth it for 9GB or so extra space? :p

Edit: Looks like the M500 has about half the write speed, at 250MB/S whereas the 840 Evo has 520MB/S. Unless I am missing something, doesn't think make the Samsung Evo a considerably better drive?
Click to expand...

No hardware wise there is no real difference. The drive itself with no software has the same issue (all of them do) the smaller the drive, the lower the memory chips, the less internal "striping" going on. The value in the specs you are seeing is with Turbowrite which uses a very complicated and fast nand buffer to hold onto the information as it is slowly committed to your 270MBs drive. It's slightly dangerous to have it enabled because that can be in theory a lot of information that may not be committed to the system during random restarts or outages.

In the end it really doesn't matter. For the general user trying to find something outside SSD to SSD copying that will be able to transfer more than 250MB/s is going to be a stretch.

So unless you copy a lot of file's to your non storage drives or are constantly imaging back and forth between SSD's. Write speeds are going to have little impact on performance or feel.

That said overall I would say the Evo is probably an overall better consumer drive with the Crucial being a better critical system drive.
 
Topweasel said:
No hardware wise there is no real difference. The drive itself with no software has the same issue (all of them do) the smaller the drive, the lower the memory chips, the less internal "striping" going on. The value in the specs you are seeing is with Turbowrite which uses a very complicated and fast nand buffer to hold onto the information as it is slowly committed to your 270MBs drive. It's slightly dangerous to have it enabled because that can be in theory a lot of information that may not be committed to the system during random restarts or outages.

In the end it really doesn't matter. For the general user trying to find something outside SSD to SSD copying that will be able to transfer more than 250MB/s is going to be a stretch.

So unless you copy a lot of file's to your non storage drives or are constantly imaging back and forth between SSD's. Write speeds are going to have little impact on performance or feel.

That said overall I would say the Evo is probably an overall better consumer drive with the Crucial being a better critical system drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I ended up ordering the Crucial as it was cheaper.
 
I have a crucial m4 and its been great, my only complaint is the their windows firmware updater blows chunks. Everytime I update the drive the updater errors and it makes me think my drive is toast, I run the updater again and it says the drive is up to date. It's updating the drive and then erroring for some reason, so hopefully one day it doesn't brick my system.
 
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