Best SSD for SATA II Notebooks?

Your best 'bang for the buck' is the Intel 80GB model (though I highly recommend the 160GB, Intel 320 series).

On SATA2 or SATA3 with any current SSD, your biggest performance jump will be moving to an SSD. Moving sideways between SSD's is just 'flavour' (some things will be faster, while other things will be slower - but overall, they're all in the same 'feel' factor league - bang for the buck wise).

While the benchmarks may say otherwise; Intel is still the wisest SSD choice today.

 

M4 has the best performance on SATA II. Followed by C300, then Samsung 470, then Intel 320.

Reliability: Samsung 470 and Crucial C300 are as reliable as Intel (actually a bit more reliable when counting failures on Newegg).

There's is one issue with Crucial drives. Intel's LPM causes problems and needs to be turned off. After that it's fine.

Here's a review that compares Intel 320, Samsung 470 and Crucial C300 on a SATA II laptop.
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-ssd-320.aspx

 

Besides the added capacity - why is Intel's 160GB model superior to the 80GB one?

And why is Intel "the wisest SSD choice today" if both the reviews and customer experience (e.g. failure rates) from Newegg say otherwise?

Phil, the review you linked to had yet again the high capacity models put into action, but as I've understood the smaller ones are slower (for example Intel 320 40GB uses only half of it's nand channels afaik) thus the situation may be a bit different there. Or what do you think?

 

the more nand the better the performance. intel is a good option because it holds it speeds after a while. some of the others with sandforce controllers don't. samsung is in house and crucial uses marvell controllers which are very good and reliable. also, samsung, intel and crucial are in house. all other ssd's are piece jobs.

 

Totally true and this will be the same for other brands too. Smaller models tend to be slower in sequential write speed.

But for day to day usage these differences will be hard to perceive. Random read and write speeds are relatively more important than sequential read and write speeds.

PS. I haven't counted the Intel 320 reviews failures. The numbers I was referring to were from Samsung 470, Crucial C300 and Intel X25m. How reliable Intel 320 is will show after a few months of selling the drive. It's too new now imo.

But as I said I put Samsung, Crucial and Intel in the same reliability class: Very good.

 

i have used Vertex III 120GB for about a month... and i had hard time noticing any improvement in speed as compared to my intel G2 80GB , plus driver and LPM issues with vertex 3 ....
just managed to got it replaced with Intel 320 160GB and sold it to a friend.
Me happily back to my X25-M G2 80GB.....

 

I've also read that the first generation SSDs - with Indilinx controllers - had problems when the drive was more than half-way filled since it needed room for wear-leveling. I guess it isn't true nowadays anymore but just checking?

 

It's not really a problem for current SSDs.

Although it's always good for long term performance and life span to try to keep ~30% free. Making a drive more than 80% full isn't a real problem but it's better to do it only temporarily.

 

Alright, thanks for all the help, I think I'll go for Crucial m4 64GB (keeping 20GB of free space there shouldn't be a problem) since I don't really see any major downsides there compared to either Samsung or Intel (Crucial being even faster!) and it's also cheaper than both at my local retailer.

 

The only edge the Samsung 470 64GB has over the Crucial M4 is the much higher sequential writes. During normal usage this isn't noticeable.

Edit: and battery life, because M4 doesn't work well with LPM.

 

Hi Guys,
I've been looking at a small upgrade for my old HP8510p as it is still working very well. I know they've got the SATA II controller so the obvious choice would be some 120GB SSD.
But then what to go for is another matter.
What would you recommend?

 

I bought the M4 when it was on sale last week or so. It is SATA6G and I don't have such a machine but no harm running it as SATA3G until I get a newer machine next year.

 

+1 on all accounts. Lower price than competitors. Sites that did tests found it at or near the top in most all test. Still quite fast w/a SATA II controller. And SATA III should make it future-proof (not that I expect to be replacing the 8740w for quite some time).

 

+1 for the M4 (I have a SATA II connection)

I own it, I use it, I love it!

 

I've SATA 2.
I've been reading a lot,but many reviews base on SATA3... so which one should I get:

• Intel 320 160GB SATA 2 shop link
• Crucial RealSSD 128GB m4 2.5" SATA 3 shop link
• ADATA S510 120GB SATA 3 shop link
• ADATA S511 120GB SATA 3 shop link
• SSD Samsung SSD470 128GB SATA2 shop link

I'm looking forward to both reliability(also firmware upgrades) and performance.
Currently intel 320 is best looking to me.
I've just bought my notebook and unfortunately it does not have SATA 3, so I'm not really looking into "future-proof" thingie.
Please help me decide.

 

consider only intel, crucial and samsung... great support and realibility are top notch

 

Samsung 470 drives are going really cheap on eBay and you'd be able to snatch up drive and save somewhere around $70 from the original price in some cases. I highly recommend the Samsung 470, as it's overall performance is excellent to the point where the power consumption numbers make me cringe when I see how fast this drive can and how much less power it absorbs.