Best SSD for ultraportable notebook

Hi,

I am looking for an SSD for my portege ultraportable.

-- My main concern is about performance in everyday real life scenarios: browsing, videos, music and documents. Those will be my main activities on the laptop. I will also be doing some Photo Editing-- Lightroom, Photoshop, also maybe shoot with camera tethered to laptop. I also multitask heavily. I will rarely game on the machine.

-- If big benchmark numbers in certain categories like seq. read or IOPS etc don't mean anything for these activities, ten those are not important to me.

-- My system is a Sandy Bridge i5 w/4gb RAM. I am guessing this will support 6Gbps transfer.

-- I can only afford around 200 USD so am looking at a 128GB/120GB drive. Please let me know which you guys think is the best drive for the stated purposes. I have read a lot of reviews but they mostly focus on benchmark numbers and I don't know how they translate to real world, hence i am asking for your help on this.

Thank you very much

 

Crucial M4 128GB is $219 and a good SSD.

 

Phil, if you're talking about the Newegg price, it went back up to $259.99 a few days ago. I should have picked one up when it was at $219.

 

Ag76, I got the $219 from Google shopping, not Newegg.

 

Thanks Phil, I'll give Google shopping a try.

 

If you can manage with a 96GB size, the Kingston V+100 96GB is $100 after $50 Mail In Rebate.

Newegg.com - Kingston SSDNow V+100 SVP100S2/96G 2.5" 96GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

If you're a new newegg customer use the code newcustomer10 to get $10 off in addition. It's not going to break any benchmarks, but it is very power sipping and generally an overall good SSD. I ordered one for my ULV notebook.

Review here: http://www.storagereview.com/kingston_ssdnow_v100_review_96gb

Artificial benchmarks it doesn't look real great but in real world application it's decent. It's in between an Intel X25-V 40GB and an Intel 310 80GB as far as performance. But the 0.2W idle is great for extending battery life.

 

I'd say Kingston V+ 100 and Intel 320 perform nearly identical.

Real life benchmarks (below the Vantage scores): Intel 320-ssd: meer voor minder | Trace-based benchmarks | Core | Tweakers.net Reviews

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't think I can make do with 96 GB. I am looking at atleast 120/128 GB.

Question: Any real world difference in using SATA 3 SSDs over SATA 2? Any good SATA 3 ones out there without bugs?

 

Stop looking to deep into the "M4 Bugs" because they are not the M4's problems. Intel RST drivers are giving bad commands to the SSD and causing them to stutter, but it is not just the M4. Vertex 3, M4, C300, are all having issues. I love my M4