A good ssd

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fluffypuffy17

fluffypuffy17

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Hi, i was looking to buy an ssd, mayb 60gb. My price range is $100-$200.
Everyone has been saying the intel ssd are the best but i dont see amything good about them. There speeds are like 250mbps and 70mbps for writing. I saw some other ssd for cheaper and they had 285mbps read and 275mbps write. Anything i am missing?
 
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For $200 look for the Crucial C300, GSkill Phoenix Pro or OCZ Vertex 2. The newer Sandforce controlled drives are faster than the Intel ones. You can get 100-120GB for $200. Perfect for Windows , Office and your games/programs.
 
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fluffypuffy17

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You think anything less than a 120 is to little space? Oh and also which is better in the long run, read speed or write speed. The crucial 355mbps read with sata 3 looks likes the fastest, but has slow write speed compared to other ssd. Im going to install windows, maybe 3 games and the rest for programs.
 
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adampower

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As to the original question about intel vs sandforce. The 'real' world application is much the same. Intel was the iops king (queen?) until sandforce's 1200 series controllers came along. Now they are very similar.

The way we use our drives (I like to say us as though I'm not the only one) the write speed is actually rarely tested. For the most part you will only 'write' your OS once. You will only write your favourite game once... etc. And even these write speeds are probably limited by the read speed from wherever you are getting this game, OS, office, etc.

In practice the intel drives are still very near the best. And the low power consumption makes them very attractive for laptops. However, imho the current round of sandforce based drives are better. They basically match the intel for iops and read whilst heavily trumping intel in writes. Power consumption is generally quite low as well.

The OCZ drives you linked are excellent examples of current SSDs. Likely the best sata II drives available today.

However, intel has been threatening to drop a G3 drive on us for some time. Purportedly this drive will include much safer writes and somewhat cheaper nand (in price/gb). These two upgrades are worth the wait if you have waited this long.

Also, sandforce has some better controllers available which will hopefully show up paired with 25nm Nand as well in the new year. We sit on the doorstep of the next SSD generation which will really put some pressure on manufacturers to start putting SSD in new builds over HDDs. It won't be long before people's grandparents will be using SSDs without even knowing it.
 
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fluffypuffy17

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i will loom into your g3 for intel. but for now i increased my budget. I was thinking about getting 2ocz vertex 2 60gb. 285, 275 read write in raid 0 as opposed to a single 120gb 285/275mbps. They are similar in price. Is this a good idea?
 
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RetiredChief

RetiredChief

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Some pros & Cons
Raid0: Great boost to seq read/write, but for the more important 4K random Read writes and access time, no boost. Have alway used raid0 on HDDs (for last 12 -> 15 yrs) but with SSDs i've opted to go with larger SSDs as opposed to two smaller ones in Raid0. Bear in mind 4 of the 5 SSDs I have are older models (Pre SF1200) and Trim was very Important for these drives (see below on Trim).

On trim: You loose Trim (may be enabled, but will not be used). The newer SSDs such as the SF1200 have improved "Garbage colection" which eilimiates to a large degree dependency on trim to prevent degreagation over time. However, trim does still help.
 
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adampower

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I agree with retired cheif in that one large ssd is better than two small raided ssds. The fact is that with a good ssd the speed at which your storage media can access information is getting to the point where other components of your system are causing delays. Can you see the difference between 300iops (raptor) and 50k iops (good ssd)... YES.. Can you see the difference between 50k iops and (almost) 100k? not really. I didn't think iops scaled well with raid but apparently sandforce 1222s do scale nicely.

Personally I don't think there is a bad time to buy an ssd. However, February may be a better time to buy an ssd.
 
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Twoboxer

Twoboxer

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Yes and no lol. Putting the OS and a bit more is one level of upgrade . . . putting your OS and your most popular apps/games and allowing for the incremental crap that gets installed to "C" no matter where you specify the install and makiong sure there's enough free space so that the drive doesn't bottleneck . . . Yes, I like more than 64MB (eg, 120GB) and think its more important than differences in speed.

Which is better . . . read or write speed? From the link I gave you:

"Drives like the OCZ Vertex 2 or the G.Skill don’t outperform the other drives, but they do well in all benchmarks and even deliver good bang for the buck. We therefore grant our Recommended Buy Award to these two 100 to 120 GB products."




 
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blackhawk1928

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The drive you linked is really good. OCZ makes good SSD drives. However just to make sure you aren't looking at the wrong thing. Read speeds of an SSD are extremely unimportant when the SSD is used as a boot drive, you should be looking at access times. A drive with half the read speed as another drive will still be faster as a boot drive if its access time is lower. Intel SSD's for a very long time dominated with thier access times, not the fastest reads/writes but their access times made other SSD's simply look like a joke, now many more drives from competition are starting to match and some exceed them with access times and thats what counts. However Intel is soon to release thier next round of SSD's which should be in the 20-30nm range, they might even retake the throne as the fastest once again.
 
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M

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adampower

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Definitely wait for a sale. You won't wait long.

By next Christmas I mean the 25nm ssds will be out and you can get more gb for your dollar. The new ssds will come out. Just a matter of when. Me, I would wait until February and re-evaluate.
 
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