Upgrading Workstation with SSD

sirsanio

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Jun 14, 2012
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Hello guys!
Just a quick shout out for some help:
Looking to upgrade a 2 year old workstation (Dell Precision T1600) and was wondering which SSD would be the best.
i narrowed it down to these and am leaning towards the Mushkin.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226237
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211603
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171741
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147189
Here the short url to neweggs comparison feature between those 4:
http://alturl.com/pib35

Any help/insight (eg. if you know a comparable product i have not listed) would be greatly appreciated!
Best regards,
sanio
 
Solution
Most modern 3rd generation SATA 3 6Gb/s solid state drives form a very tight performance cluster. Users normally can't tell any difference in performance. In fact most consumers and casual gamers usually can't tell any performance difference between older SATA 2 3Gb/s and SATA 3 6Gb/s ssd's.

The synthetic benchmarks which include the read and write benchmarks are very deceptive. Since modern ssd performance differences are so small, the benchmarks are designed to grossly exaggerate those minor differences. In addition ssd companies manipulate the various benchmark settings and configurations to present their ssd's in the most favorable light. Unfortunately that practice results in benchmarks that do not accurately represent what 90% of...
I assume you mean you are upgrading a home office workstation and not a business enterprise workstation.

I normally recommend Samsung because of their excellent performance and proven track record. Crucial, Intel, and Plextor are also worth considering.

I maintain the ssd database listed in the sticky at the very top of this ssd forum section. Here is the link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to the brands and models you are interested in and follow the links to the technical reviews.
 

sirsanio

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Thank you sir!
That is a well maintained database!
The workstation is indeed a home office workstation for architecture work.
Specs: Xeon E3-1245, 3.3GHz, 16GB Ram, Quadro2000 GPU
The reason why i was looking at the Mushking vs the Samsung was the nearly doubled write speed.
I also saw that the 840 pro has about the same writespeeds as the Mushkin, but at a much higher price point.
Are there particular reasons why you would reccommend the Samsung over the AData or Mushkin?
 
Most modern 3rd generation SATA 3 6Gb/s solid state drives form a very tight performance cluster. Users normally can't tell any difference in performance. In fact most consumers and casual gamers usually can't tell any performance difference between older SATA 2 3Gb/s and SATA 3 6Gb/s ssd's.

The synthetic benchmarks which include the read and write benchmarks are very deceptive. Since modern ssd performance differences are so small, the benchmarks are designed to grossly exaggerate those minor differences. In addition ssd companies manipulate the various benchmark settings and configurations to present their ssd's in the most favorable light. Unfortunately that practice results in benchmarks that do not accurately represent what 90% of consumers do with their computers. Although it might appear as if one modern ssd is twice as fast as another ssd, real world scenarios suggest the actual difference between the fastest and slowest ssd's is only about 10%.

Another problem is a user's motherboard. When it comes to ssd support not all motherboards are equal. SSD performance can be affected by a motherboard's SATA controller or chipset & drivers. Intel chipsets and drivers are considered to be the best.

Lastly one has to consider software applications which brings up a few questions for you. You mentioned architectural work. Does it involve a lot of rendering processes? Does the software application use compressible or incompressible data? Is the application write intensive?

The reason I recommend Samsung is because of their ssd history. Samsung has a lot of experience with ssd's. The very first ssd Tom's Hardware ever reviewed was a Samsung prototype back in 2006. Back then the drives weren't called ssd's. Samsung has come a long way since then. They do their own research and design and manufacture all of their own ssd components. Samsung is an OEM that supplies ssd's for "off the shelf" brands such as Dell, Sony, Lenovo, Acer, and a few others. Retail sales to consumers was actually an afterthought. Overall performance is excellent and Samsung has a proven track record for reliability.

To be fair I should mention there are other 3rd generation ssd's that are very good. The three others I normally mention are Crucial, Intel, and Plextor. I'm sure there are a few more that are very good.

BTW - Taking into account your workstation configuration and the work you do, have you considered an enterprise level ssd?
 
Solution

sirsanio

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Thank you for taking the time and answering me so detailed!
This helped me today and will help me in the future as well.
I went ahead and purchased the Samsung 840 250GB, based on your recommendation.
(I also had a peek at the performance test link you posted about this very ssd)
I plan to setup the machine so that the ssd is used for the OS and programs.
data that is written, saved etc will be hosted on the machines 1tb 7200 rpm hdd.
The most used program will be Autodesk revit. while it is capable of rendering, that function will not be utilized in this case.
The main reason for the upgrade is a performance boost.
Again, i very much appreciate your help and time!
Best regards,
Sanio