What Brand/Series SSD do you prefer?

Hey all,

I'm looking to get a couple new SSD's to replace my old Intel X-25 M. While the one I have was great when it came out, it's aged considerably, and pretty much any new SSD available today can outperform it. Does anybody have suggestions on what brand/series of MLC-based Solid States are currently the top performers?

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2966.html should have you covered. Personally I went for OCZ agility 2 since price/performance was exactly what I wanted. Was also on sale recently on the egg, $160 for 128gb

Alright! Thanks for the article, and the general summary! I think I'll probably go with the Crucial M4, as their ratings on newegg are fantastic, and they should be reliable enough that I could trust them to operate in a 3 drive RAID 0 configuration.

I got interested in buying SSD's for a couple of laptops that we have, but upon shopping newegg I found that some of the models in my size range had really bad customer feedback, worse than I've seen on newegg for any other product I've researched. Well a hard drive is pretty important to how your machine runs, and real important to the integrity of your data, so I searched to try to find brands with reasonable feedback. Intel and Crucial seemed to have the best, although they have had glitches too. I don't care what controller it has or how fast it is in theoretical benchmarks, if it fails a week after you install it you aren't going to be happy.

It's pretty hard to tell from the benchmarks how it is going to run in real life. I've noticed that for most tests the SSD will test very many times faster than a mechanical hard drive, but in real world stuff they are a lot closer together. This leads me to believe that one SSD being a little faster than another one really doesn't matter a bit in real world performance.

I prefer the OCZ brand... but only because my OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB has ran great and I have never had a single problem with it since purchase.

Now, after reading all the problems with the Vertex 3... I probably won't purchase another OCZ again, which is a shame. I may go with a Corsair, or Intel drive.

After some research based on everyone's advice, I've actually decided to go with Corsair's Performance 3 Series drives. While they don't have the greatest ability when it comes to randrom 4k reads/writes, or the most sequential read/write speed, they're known to be quite reliable, and have the most aggressive Garbage Collection system available for consumer SSD's.

All in all, I'd rather have reliable long term performance than a system which I need to wipe every 6-12 months to keep it running at full speed.

Thanks to everyone for the help/advice!

Thanks! Oddly enough, the only reviews I've found that actually demonstrate the incredible Garbage Collector in the P3 series are reviews of other SSD's. Every time, these disks are brought to their knees with TRIM disabled, while the Corsair Drives chug along as if it was day one - with, or without TRIM.

I may wait around for the upcoming Force Series GT, just to see if those feature their promised performance, and the same GC ability. If they pull it off, they would definitely be drives worth waiting for.

Junction points? I've never heard of this. As far as losing files go, that's more of an inconvenience than a concern to me. I've got a backup RAID 1 array that I use to store bulk data on my computer. Everything on my boot drive is replaceable, with the exception of gamesaves. And I've only got room for three additional drives anyways.