Tom's Hardware's SSD Hierarchy Chart
We understand that SSD prices make it difficult to adopt the latest technology. Maybe that's why you aren't too keen on blowing a couple hundred dollars on solid-state storage, especially when you can spend the same amount and buy four 2 TB hard drives or a high-performance processor. That's why it's important to put things into perspective.
Over the past five years, CPU performance has hit new and unforeseen heights, and processors are increasingly spending time waiting on data from hard drives. This is what makes storage today's most glaring bottleneck. Overcoming it requires an SSD.
As a point of comparison, a file operation completes 85% faster on a low-end SSD than it does on a high-end hard drive, but there is only an 88% speed difference between a high-end hard drive and a high-end SSD. That why you shouldn't let less aggressive benchmark results at the low-end deter you from making the switch. You don't have to have the best SSD to get great performance relative to a hard drive.
This hierarchy chart relies on information provided in our Storage Bench v1.0, as it ranks performance in a way that reflects average daily use for a consumer workload. This applies to gamers and home office users. The chart has been structured so that each tier represents a 10% difference in performance. Some rankings are educated guesses based on information from testing a model at a different capacity or a drive of similar architecture. As such, it is possible that an SSD may shift one tier once we actually get a chance to test it. Furthermore, SSDs within a tier are listed alphabetically.
There are several drives that we're going to intentionally leave out of our hierarchy list. Enterprise-oriented SLC- and 512 GB MLC-based SSDs are ignored due to the extreme price they command (and the difficult we have getting samples in from vendors). Furthermore, SSDs with a capacity lower than 60 GB are left off because of the budget nature of that price range.
| SSD Performance Hierarchy Chart | |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240 GB Patriot WildFire 240 GB Samsung 830 SSD 256 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND |
| Tier 2 | Adata S511 240 GB Corsair Force GT 240 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND |
| Tier 3 | Crucial m4 256 GB Intel SSD 510 250 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120 GB Patriot WildFire 120 GB Samsung 830 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND |
| Tier 4 | Corsair Force 3 240 GB OCZ Agility 3 240 GB Patriot Pyro 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 5 | Intel SSD 510 120 GB Crucial m4 128 GB |
| Tier 6 | Adata S511 120 GB Corsair Force GT 120 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 256 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND |
| Tier 7 | OCZ Agility 2 240 GB OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB |
| Tier 8 | Corsair Force 3 120 GB Intel SSD 320 300 GB OCZ Agility 3 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 120 GB Patriot Pyro 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 9 | Corsair Force 3 60 GB Crucial m4 64 GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 128 GB Intel SSD 320 160 GB OCZ Agility 3 60 GB Patriot Pyro 60 GB Other 60 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 10 | Intel SSD 320 80 GB OCZ Agility 2 120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 60 GB Other 120 GB first-gen SandForce SSDs |
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I would just add that to anyone looking for a super cheap SSD, look for older drives on sales before buying some of the cheaper solutions. I just bought two excellent SATA II models for less than a $1/GB. The OCZ Solid 3 and Corsair Force 3 are routinely found for $120 for the 120GB models. Occasionally, you can find the Agility 30 for $40 as well. I would much prefer people go that route than the deceptively-named Vertex Plus or JMicron controlled drives. If you have a Z68 board, caching is a good option if you can get a good deal on a fast, 60GB or less drive. After a couple days, routine tasks will get SSD-fast. One time(ish) data won't be accelerated, but there's a lot of value there.
Tom's recommendations can't recommend one time sales or the like, but my best advice is shop around before buying a low end drive for MSRP. And stay away from Jmicron and the Vertex Plus.
Can we please get some SSD RAID benchmarks?
I would also like to add that I was one of those unlucky few who were affected by the myriad SF2281 issues. Despite the nonsense that it was all Intel's fault, the last FW did fix all of my issues with 2nd gen SandForce drives. As such, I highly recommend the awesome Mushkin Chronos Deluxe. As is pointed out in the performance section, the Wildfire and the Chronos D are identical but for price. As an added bonus, both drives are manufactured here in America (how much of your computer hardware is anymore??). I can't recommend the 2281 + 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND drives enough (except the MaxIOPS, which is not made in the USA).
Sorry, I missed the tier 2 rating for the 240 GB drive but the 120 performs just as well and at $180, can you imagine 2 in a RAID configuration?
I see you're quoting the manufacturer's speed of 500 MB/s for the OCZ Agility 3. I bought one on that basis, then found I got way lower speed (250 write/350 read at best, much less typically, below 50 for small R/W), even though I was using SATA 3. OCZ say to get the rated speed you must be using a particular Intel SATA controller, and a benchmark that uses highly compressible data (all 1's or all 0's) - it won't run that fast with typical real data. Have a look on the OCZ Forum for people's real experiences before trusting the "too good to be true" headline speed.
so i guess since there is no big price riase as a result of the recetn HD crysis in Thailand, we can get the SSD's as per the above prices. anyone bought SSD's recently ?(like last week or this week)
I see you're quoting the manufacturer's speed of 500 MB/s for the OCZ Agility 3. I bought one on that basis, then found I got way lower speed (250 write/350 read at best, much less typically, below 50 for small R/W), even though I was using SATA 3....
I was just going to ask about Agility 3. I bought it a week ago but couldn't get more than ~260MB/s from it. I was thinking it's because there's another SATA II HDD on the same controller.
ok. i have some problems with charts. Could the tiers be sub-classified into random r/w performance, sequential performance and then an overall rank? Because this is a bit weird...see,
The Intel 510 and Crucial m4 (both 120/128 GB) are put in tier 5. the m4 smokes the elm crest drive by a HUGE margin in random stuff and both are averagely the same in sequential ops (m4 better at reads and intel at writes). Yet they're in the same tier.
The Intel 320 120GB and Samsung 470 128GB both have higher IOPS than the 510, but look where they are.
The 160GB 320 is placed a tier below the 470 128 GB, but it beats it at everything except slightly lagging behind in sequential writes.
Now the article says it's based on storage bench. But, at the 120GB capacity point, wouldn't random IOPS have more significance? especially reads, since you'll mostly be reading small files to load programs, boot the OS, etc.
Large sequential writes would most probably be bottlenecked by other devices. Same may apply to reads.
Either more random IOPS don't always mean better random performance, or i'm not understanding things correctly.
Another thing. The last i checked, intel's 20GB 311 was sitting at about $115. Why not just buy an 64GB m4 for a cache drive (or heck, just use it as a boot drive)? Doesn't make sense using the 311. The m4 isn't slower than a HDD by any means....If the 311 was priced at $40 that would be great (and actually make sense), but at about $6 per GB...the 34nm flash version of the vertex 2 (i.e. non E-series) is priced at $170 on newegg. Intel prices 16% of that capacity at 67% of the price. It's just dumb.
What about the Kingston HyperX SSD's? They've gotten a lot of good press recently, and while not the cheapest, their performance seems to be top-notch ... and the bundled "upgrade" kits are well packaged.
Glad to see the Samsung 830 make the list. The 470 series has a stellar record of reliability. Let's hope Samsung can repeat it with the 830.
I can't believe you guys are still recommending the highly unreliable OCZ drives. You are doing your readers a big disservice.
You don't need Intel's Z68 chipset if you want to go the caching route. The OCZ Synapse works with any Windows 7 computer and any SATA boot drive. Obviously SATA III would be preferable but it isn't a requirement.
This SandForce SF-2281 caching solution strikes me as the perfect transition solution for users not yet ready to get an SSD for a boot drive. It's relatively inexpensive, provides a performance boost on par with most SSDs, solves the capacity issue and it's EASY.
Don't get me wrong, within 5 years virtually all computers will move to SSD boot drives but in the mean time caching seems to be a great option. The only question remaining for me is reliability given that caching is write-intensive. I guess this is why OCZ uses 50 per cent of the disk for over-provisioning.
Read about it here: http://thessdreview.com/our-review [...] eat-price/
ok. i have some problems with charts. Could the tiers be sub-classified into random r/w performance, sequential performance and then an overall rank? Because this is a bit weird...see,
The Intel 510 and Crucial m4 (both 120/128 GB) are put in tier 5. the m4 smokes the elm crest drive by a HUGE margin in random stuff and both are averagely the same in sequential ops (m4 better at reads and intel at writes). Yet they're in the same tier.
The Intel 320 120GB and Samsung 470 128GB both have higher IOPS than the 510, but look where they are.
The 160GB 320 is placed a tier below the 470 128 GB, but it beats it at everything except slightly lagging behind in sequential writes.
Now the article says it's based on storage bench. But, at the 120GB capacity point, wouldn't random IOPS have more significance? especially reads, since you'll mostly be reading small files to load programs, boot the OS, etc.
Large sequential writes would most probably be bottlenecked by other devices. Same may apply to reads.
Either more random IOPS don't always mean better random performance, or i'm not understanding things correctly.
Another thing. The last i checked, intel's 20GB 311 was sitting at about $115. Why not just buy an 64GB m4 for a cache drive (or heck, just use it as a boot drive)? Doesn't make sense using the 311. The m4 isn't slower than a HDD by any means....If the 311 was priced at $40 that would be great (and actually make sense), but at about $6 per GB...the 34nm flash version of the vertex 2 (i.e. non E-series) is priced at $170 on newegg. Intel prices 16% of that capacity at 67% of the price. It's just dumb.
If you want separate rankings, I'd recommend looking at our reviews. Second, I'd never go by the spec sheet. It's always more inflated than actual performance. Third, our Storage Bench is an actual benchmark that looks at real-world performance. Think of it like an in house rendition of PCMark 7 (we actually use the same code base as Futuremark.)
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
The dirty secret is that all SF drives of the same NAND flavor are basically identical in performance. Kingston uses sync ONFi NAND on the HyperX, so it's equivalent to the Vertex 3.
You don't need Intel's Z68 chipset if you want to go the caching route. The OCZ Synapse works with any Windows 7 computer and any SATA boot drive. Obviously SATA III would be preferable but it isn't a requirement.
This SandForce SF-2281 caching solution strikes me as the perfect transition solution for users not yet ready to get an SSD for a boot drive. It's relatively inexpensive, provides a performance boost on par with most SSDs, solves the capacity issue and it's EASY.
Don't get me wrong, within 5 years virtually all computers will move to SSD boot drives but in the mean time caching seems to be a great option. The only question remaining for me is reliability given that caching is write-intensive. I guess this is why OCZ uses 50 per cent of the disk for over-provisioning.
Read about it here: http://thessdreview.com/our-review [...] eat-price/
Have you seen the price on the Synapse? 64 GB is $154. That's really sucks in comparison to a 60 GB Agility 3 at $104. Caching doesn't even give you a speed up on everything, only stuff that you do repeatedly. And if you change your routine, performance "resets" and starts at hard drive levels again.
If caching were cheaper, I'd have no problem recommending it. As it stands, you're paying more for less performance.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
no SSD's above 256Gb wtf...
I explained on the ranking page why we left those drives out. If you can buy a 512 GB drive, I'd say that price clearly isn't a problem.
I can't believe you guys are still recommending the highly unreliable OCZ drives. You are doing your readers a big disservice.
Let's be fair, all second-gen based SSDs had the same problems that OCZ had. Second, Sandforce was really the one responsible for fixing the bug. Third, OCZ is the launching partner of SF, but the company has gotten a bad rap because they had the most aggressive firmware and largest install base.
We need to know which brands are the least most reliable. I'd pay more for reliability!
We need to know which brands are the least most reliable. I'd pay more for reliability!
There's no definitive data backing this up other than my own experience and what's generally reported by larger enterprise clients like data centers, who ALWAYS pay more for reliability. The top choices remain Intel and Micron/Crucial.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com