Which SSD should I buy?

F

forkedt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
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I have a coupon to tiger direct for $10 so I'm looking to buy an affordable SSD, these two look good:

OCZ 80gb

Crucial 64gb

Everyone was jumping on the Crucial the other day, but it says it only writes at 75MB/sec, while the OCZ says it writes at 275MB/sec? I'm sure I'm missing something, but I dont know enough about SSDs to know why I shouldnt go with the OCZ?

Thanks for the help,
Forkedt
 
Generally the OCZ Sandforce published specs are a bit misleading. This is based on benchmarking with compressible data which gives you a higher number than would normally be encountered in a real world scenario. They use ATTO for their benchmarks rather than AS SSD.
 
I say wait a month for everyone to release gen 3 drives - they will be blowing these out and the new drives should come in a little cheaper due to better process.
 
Is there any information about the 3rd generations yet? I dont mind waiting, but I'd like to learn about them in the meantime if I do.
 
In the exact same boat atm, unfortunatly being in Australia our Prices are higher, and availiablity is lower.

I have been tossing up between the Crucial C300 RealSSD 64GB and the OCZ Vertex 2 E 60GB. I have decided to go with the OCZ after reading numerous reviews, the issue with the Crucial C300 64GB is that its Write speeds are considerably slower then its older brother - the Crucial C300 256GB.

My intention is to buy the smaller OCZ Vertex 2 E 60GB for now, as I'm buying a COMPLETE new system (Intel 2600k etc) and wanted the feeling of everything being 'fresh', 'new' and 'amazing' for just those few weeks/months before the next thing comes along. I will aim to re-sell the OCZ when the new Crucial C400/Intel G3 or Vertex 3's come out later this year.

I understand the Crucial C300 are SATA III vs. the Vertex SATA II and the Crucial's Read speeds are consinderable faster (250mb/s vs. 350mb/s+) but the inconsistent Write speeds on its smaller 64GB brother has pushed me in the direction of the all-rounder; OCZ Vertex 2 E.

*Breathes* haha.
 
I'm afraid you were mislead by Sandforce's inflated specifications. On real data, the Sandforce SSDs are much slower than their spec, especially the smaller models like the 60GB.

To get a realistic look at the performance, just look up some AS-SSD benchmarks on the web. First, here is a 64GB C300 (on a 3 Gbps SATA port):

c300-64-i.png


Note the read speed column: 264 MB/s, 29 MB/s, and 174 MB/s. The read speed is almost always the most important, particularly for the small SSDs, since most users will not be writing a lot of data to them, but they will be reading the same data repeatedly.

Now, a fresh 60GB Vertex 2:

asssd7gj4.png


Note the read speeds: 201 MB/s, 21 MB/s, and 106 MB/s. The C300 beats the Vertex 2 across the board in read speeds, being 30% to 65% faster on reads. The fresh Vertex 2 does beat the C300 by about 30% on write speeds.

But after a Sandforce drive has been used, its speed drops significantly. Check out the speeds in this post:

http://tkkgg.tk

Read speeds are even lower, and write speeds have dropped to 65 MB/s, 44 MB/s, and 60 MB/s, which is below that of the C300.
 
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I would advise to stay away from sandforce. I had one ocz that was slower than my kingston value drive, and I had 2 gskill sandforce drives die in less than a week from newegg. My kingston drive has been rock solid and my intel drive has been pretty good but will bsod with the amd ahci drivers but the kingston wont.

I would recommend intel or kingston. But of those two you listed I would go with the crucial, but I have no personal experience with it.
 
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