Best, Cheapest 500/512GB SSD?

What's the best bang-for-buck 512GB SSD?

 

The Crucial M4 or M500 with a slightly lower capacity, but higher real world performance.

See:
Hard Drives - Desktop & External Drives at Memory Express


Don't forget you can price match/beat (by another 25%) from the above link if a better deal is found in Canada.



Good luck.

 

Samsung 840 Evo 500GB for around $370 has got to be one of the best bangs for the buck

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+1 for the M500 480GB

The EVO looks pretty good on paper but until I see a "Steady State" test, to have a better idea of it's real world performance, I'm not sold on it.
Come on {H}ardOCP review this already! They are looking for a SSD reviewer, so it may be a while, Tiller, you are right for the job!

 

The 840s, including the Evo, use 3 bit TLC NAND. The life span on that is shorter, and from the data I saw it could be 1/3 the life of other SSD drives. That concerns me.

Edit: Anandtech doesn't seem to be concerned on the lifespan. Here is thier review. AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840 EVO Review: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB & 1TB Models Tested

On the other hand, MaximumPC mag, Oct 2013 page 78, gave the 1TB Evo a 9 Kick Azz in its review. It beat the M500 by a significant margin.

 

Were those benchmarks on an empty drive in Maximum PC? That's how most drives are tested, rated by the manufacturer and reviewed. That's how AnandTech does their reviews, not even an OS on the drive. I prefer real world tests, not on an empty drive. That's how the SSD will be used. The 840 EVO (750GB) does well in TweakTown's "Drives with Data Testing."
Samsung 840 EVO 750GB SSD Review - Benchmarks - PCMark Vantage - Drives with Data Testing | TweakTown
Hopefully, the EVO will perform better than the benchmark king, 840 Pro (256GB), which isn't close to the M500 (480GB) in the "Steady State" Read/Write Mix. The 840 TLC (500GB) is on the bottom. See the last graph.
HARDOCP - Iometer & Steady State Testing - Crucial M500 480GB SSD Review
Samsung has emphasized low queue depth performance with the EVO. Under normal workloads, a queue depth will rarely go above 4, SSDs are too fast to let the queue depth grow high.

 

Well, they said " To test the Evo drive, we attached it to our SSD test bench, installed the beta version 4.2 of the Samsung Magician software, initiated the AS SSD incompressible data benchmark, and went to get a cup of coffee. When we returned, we were lucky not to have been sipping coffee when we saw the numbers because we surely would have done a spit-take. The Evo racked up a score of 855MB/s for reads and 1GB/s for writes, and over 100K IOPS in 4K random writes, as well. As we progressed through our test suite, the Evo laid waste to all the previous drives and became the fastest SSD we have ever tested by a sizable margin, even beating out its big brother, the more expensive 840 Pro. We also tested the drive with Rapid Mode disabled, and it was still extremely fast, making it a supremely competitive SSD that seems to have no weaknesses other than its short three-year warranty."

Here is the link. Let me know what you think, since I am thinking about the Evo.

Samsung 840 EVO 1TB Benchmarks | Maximum PC

 

Now all they have to do is come up with a 512GB mSATA EVO.

 

Toms Hardware like the 840 Evo. Here is thier review. Samsung's 840 Was Good; The 840 EVO Is Better - Samsung 840 EVO SSD: Tested At 120, 250, 500, And 1000 GB

 

Tom's could have done something interesting with their "Storage Bench v1.0" They try to do a real world test but fail. I don't know anyone that will not put a file system on their drive or leave it empty.

Tom's does confirm that the 120GB EVO should be avoided. Like the 830 128GB, 120GB 840, 128GB 840 Pro, the Samsugs in this size range have high latency issues.

 

Toms hardware reviewed the M500, and said this " This takes us to the unavoidable comparison with Samsung's 840 EVO. We just reviewed that entire line-up in Samsung 840 EVO SSD: Tested At 120, 250, 500, And 1000 GB. Although the 840 EVOs employ triple-level cell memory, it gets a big boost from some quantity of emulated SLC, too. Consequently, the EVO is on par with, and sometimes ahead of the M500 in write performance benchmarks. Read performance is squarely in Samsung's camp, though.

The 840 EVO is missing power loss protection, cross-die redundancy, and it currently lacks Opal 2.0 encryption, which is one of the M500's aces. Samsung says its EVO will get that last feature in time, though the discussion is largely academic until the new 840 shows up for sale anyway. Both drive families sport three years of warranty coverage, but suddenly-lower pricing on the M500s might give them an edge."

I wonder about longevity, how big an issue is cross-die redundancy? Power loss on a laptop doesn't seem that big an issue.

I know I have posted in this thread a lot, but I have never lost track of the OPs goal, the best cheapest 500GB SSD. And so far the M500 and the 840 Evo seem like the best options. Benchmarks that I have seen favor the 840 Evo. Of course that is not the whole picture. Longevity is important, and of course real world performance or issues.

 

+1 for this review.
I used this review to base my purchase for a 750GB evo. Originally I was considering buying a 512GB 840 pro due to the longer warranty and higher benchmarks. But, unless someone can prove me wrong, I don't think we'll be experiencing a half a second increase in real world performance when loading applications.

Also, for ~60-70 more dollars, you'll be getting +238GB more
By the time 3 years (I'm sure will last longer) is up, the SSD market "should" be much better and we would hopefully be able to buy 1TB SSD for roughly 300.

 

The power loss protection in a laptop would be in case of a forced shutdown with the power button or BSODs. The on-board capacitors would, essentially, flush the drive of data in a write operation ensuring it gets to the NAND and is not lost.

TLC has a lower life expectancy, write endurance, for the same amount of writes compared to MLC. All things being equal, TLC will die first. That's not to say that TLC longevity will be a concern for most users, it won't. Power users with heavy write workflows may have cause for concern with TLC.

 

TLC longevity is a concern. If the drive could last it would be nice to move it from laptop to laptop over the years. Have you seens a good longevity report?

OP, are you still here? Has your question been answered?

 

Hope this helps! SSD benchmark results with reviews on the ones best for your money.

Tom's Hardware's SSD Hierarchy Chart - Best SSDs For The Money: August 2013

 

This link shows a test of two 250GB 840s. At 30GB per day write with a WA (Write Amplification) of 3 will last about 25 years. The average consumer will probably write 10GB or less per day. So, for the OP, a 500GB EVO should be about double. TLC longevity is not really a concern for the average user. MLC should last even longer.
Hardware.Info tests lifespan of Samsung SSD 840 250GB TLC SSD [Updated with final conclusion] - Final update (20-6-2013) | Hardware.Info United States

 

The problem with TLC isn't so much the endurance but the horrific performance. the 840 evo is a good pick since you aren't paying through the nose for MLC but are getting close to such performance (at least in bursts).

 

Great link. Thanks for sharing. I have never heard of us.hardware.info before, I assume they are unbiased and trust worthy? Very interesting to find that static data is moved around on the drive. First time I have heard of that. To the point, minimum of 24 years before the first failed sector is awesome. And it seems to fail somewhat gracefully.

 

There is a long thread in the XtremeSystems forums where SSD owners tested endurance on different drives to kill them. HTWingNut also did a test in this forum, I believe with 120GB 840s.

The us.hardware.info is the US version of hardware.info. For example, If you go on the uk.hardware.info you'll see a little US Flag asking if you are visiting the correct country version of the site. They are a review site or testing site. They have other site's reviews. You'll see source: TweakTown in a review of the M500 480GB. If you click on the "Read more" link you will go to the TweakTown site's review page. They haven't reviewed it themselves yet.That in and of itself speaks to legitimacy, they aren't taking credit for other peoples work. They also list prices. They seem to be similar to Cnet. I haven't heard any complaints about them testing unfairly.

 

Looking to upgrade from my currest ssd too, saw a great deal for a plextor M5s sadly missed it. Is there some charts with features of the SSDs side by side? TLC/MLC, controllers used, speeds, capacity of nand, power loss protection etc. the important stuff? was banging my head against wall for half the day, was just 100£ for 256gb. Sadly haven't got the the bank to spare for a 500gb one.

SanDisk SSDs go on sales often, however i have had quite a lot of their flash memory fail on me... so i am quite skeptical on the reliability.

 

The 256gb M5s is equivalent to the 500gb Samsung 840 in terms of performance. However, you do gain the advantage of better endurance and less need for over provision. Finally, M5s has really aggressive garbage collection, this is not so good from a performance consistency perspective but better for working in non-trim environments.

 

The best and cheapest SSD is this one .. Cheapest I found
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT5...id=1398021400&sr=8-3&keywords=ssd+drive+512gb

 

You dug up this thread from september last year to recommend a drive that has been replaced twice? (by the m500 then the m550)

 

? Do you know what google search is ? prob not ..
i just searched on google ; cheapest 512GB SSD and second result was this .. first was that amazon
WTH u talkinbout duuudaa

anyway here is micron .. very good and cheap
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Micron-C400-MTFDDAC512MAM-1K1-512GB-SATA-2-5-Laptop-Solid-State-Drive-6Gbps-/161263411827?_trksid=p2054897.l4275P3.0.0&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=108[/url]

 

Note that there is a Samsung cashback offer for Samsung SSDs bought on Amazon UK which puts the 840 EVO in the same price range.

John

 

SanDisk Extreme II 480GB available for £199 @ Amazon UK

 

Crucial seem to be going for cheap lately. Considering spec wise it's close to EVO, especially if you don't want to go through the cashback hassle, I'd go with crucial. Got EVO when they were same price, ordered the crucial recently just cause it's quite cheap, so I can post some benchmarks when it arrives in a few days time.

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