Studio 1555, which SSD should I get? Crucial C300 or Sandforce?

I read a comment that the C300 is only good if it's used with a SATA III controller, which I dont' think our Studio 1555's have. A lot of people recommend a Sandforce SSD but Crucial has good support so i'm torn between which to get :/ Any thoughts?

 

The current generation SSD do not even saturate SATA 2. If at all possible, the newest SSDs are coming out soon, C400 was announced, as with SF-2500 controller and G3 are coming out this year.

As for which, I have a SF-1200 based Agility 2. Very fast, and I haven't had an issue in the 3-4 months I have owned it.

 

ahhh now you got me wanting to wait another month for the C400 to come out (In Feb from what I've read). the SF2500 they say will be another quarter. I think i'll just jump on one now. there's a C300 deal for $115 (after CA tax). I doubt i would see any noticeable difference between a C300 and possible C400 improvement since I'm on a HDD now.

 

The last I checked (admittedly not that recently), I felt that the C300s were generally a better deal than their SandForce equivalents... but I think both are fast enough such that you won't notice much of a difference between them. I don't think buying now is a bad choice; C400 and SF2500 drives will probably be disproportionately expensive at release.

 

i was almost about to buy the C300 until I found out about the Momentus XT, i'm now going through the huge thread in the Hardware subforum haha. I'm tryin gto keep the budget around $100 and you're right, those next gen SSDs will probably cost more.

 

But those new read/write speeds are so yummy! And as many believe the G3 will use the same current prices as the G2 but with double/quadruple the capacity

 

is the G3 a controller? i haven't heard much about that one, only sandforce, marvell, and indinlex?

even still with those write/read speeds, will the SATA controller in my laptop even be able to take advantage of it? since i won't be moving large files on the SSD drive, i should only look at the lower size (such as 4K) read/write speeds right?

 

No no no G3 is the upcoming Intel SSD (Generation 3, versus G2 Generation 2).

Your laptop will benefit if it is at least SATA 2 which it should be. The G3 will offer I believe 250 read/170 write but have the Intel controller (most reliable one by some accounts). But the main thing is G3 is the massive space offered for a consumer grade SSD (160, 300, 600 GB). OCZ Vertex 3 also offers 512 GB SSD with the latest SF-2500 controller.

 

I have a Studio 1558 (several, actually) with a Crucial C300 256GB. The AS SSD Benchmark reports 260MB/sec reads and 200MB/sec writes, so I'm happy.

One thing to watch out for, though, which may or may not affect the 1555 - depending on what CPU you have in the system, the C300 will randomly not be detected on [re]boot. I had this happen a lot with an i5-450M CPU, less with an i7-740QM. The latest 0006 C300 firmware seems to help somewhat, as well as changing the 1558's BIOS setup to disable quick boot. That combination of things means that I haven't seen the problem on my 1558's in some weeks now.

I have a thread on this over at the Crucial SSD forum.