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.
At the end of the day, the real-world differences between SSDs in a desktop environment aren't altogether very large. The most important jump happens when you go from a hard drive to (almost) any solid-state drive. With that said, there are measurable attributes that separate one SSD from another. But you'll need to approach a purchasing decision as the sum of many parts. Within individual apps, you'll hardly notice the difference between most SATA 3Gb/s and faster SATA 6Gb/s drives. It's the more taxing workloads that make a faster device worth owning.
Sequential performance is an important SSD attribute, but there are points beyond which it's difficult to make use of the performance in a real and meaningful way. That's why the hierarchy chart below relies on information provided by our Storage Bench v1.0, as it ranks performance in a way that reflects average daily use for a consumer workload. It's simply a ranking using one metric, and not gospel. But as far as single-number performance is concerned, it is serviceable for our needs.


Is that why you don't mention Crucial's MX100 line? With the current pricing on the 256GB and 512GB MX100 drives, it's hard to justify buying anything else at those capacity points.
MX100 256GB is ~$115 and the 512GB is $215. Hard to beat those prices.
Going by the fact that you're still recommending that stick, I'll assume I'm not doing too badly, but an overview of the current state of USB 3.0 would be nice.
b/ the killer factor is access speed vs a HDD - who gives a rats about transfer speed? - huge is huge
given the above, despite the scoffers, i still think raid 1 w/ a ssd primary & a hdd secondary could work well in some apps. none seem to have tried it & benched it meaningfully i can see
most realtime work is done by primary (ssd) drive
fast & cheap always up redundancy
d/ i hear rumors than the sandisk cache thingo has weird firmware - flushes the cache a lot - defeats the purpose? Many say its great.
loved the idea when first heard it, now not so sure
flushes cache? is that bad?
As they say, lottsa ram wins, even if slow.
So what say a big swap file on an ssd?
My 2gb, soon to be replaced, 98xp PC has a 4gb HDD swap file (suggested by windows) & it crawls - u can hear it
swapping
at least the ssd can be re-used - ram upgrades cannot
An entire copy of your system disk on cheap/fast, but niggardly on space, storage - really?
that means being anal with what goes where for ever more - time & hassle & maybe risk?
why not make it their problem?
seagate etc. hybrid 1tb drive - 8 gb cache onboard - $~100
something like sandisk intellicache~? 32gb ~$45 - not a drive - just a cache
maybe a small ssd for known scratch files like win swap etc - $45 64gb - $85 128gb - kingston?
would make a great raid 1 rig
I am told win 8 installs on 128gb can be a struggle - absurd
In theory, only cache what needs caching, not clutter.
Dont quote me if i am wrong (tho i cant see where, if they work ok)
Very fast almost all the time
Time is money - this is KISS