Is this SanDisk SSD SATA III 2.5" any good?

People always say some SSDs are better than others, either faster, more reliable, less reliable, slow and unresponsive, etc..

This drive has an "MLC" chip but I don't even know if that means it's good or bad...

Read Speed: 490MB/Sec, Write Speed: 350MB/Sec

Much better than the Samsung 840 I was looking at (non-Pro) speed-wise

However, I don't care too much about file transfer speeds, as I would be copying to/from a normal HDD anyway, I just want it to be really responsive when doing things, loading games, etc..

atm I have a 64GB Verbatim and it feels really sluggish sometimes

I'm looking at the 128GB Sandisk btw. it's not the ultra version either

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...ium=affiliate&utm_campaign=1018132_HotUKDeals

 

Basically, no, it's not a good choice. If price is your only concern, then yes, it's cheap.
True, it is MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash. Which deals with the write endurance, life expectancy of the NAND. Unfortunately, it is MLC asynchronous NAND. Synchronous NAND performs much better. The TLC (tri-level cell) in the Samsung 840, that you asked about, has a lower life expectancy, write endurance, for the same amount of writes compared to MLC. All things being equal, TLC will die first.

Asynchronous NAND vs Synchronous NAND:

Bang for Your Buck: Best 256GB Class SSD's under $200 :: TweakTown

From the Tweaktown link:
"Pricing differences between synchronous and asynchronous flash products are nearly equal between many brands... In our testing, we've concluded that no one should ever purchase a SATA III SSD with asynchronous flash. That is my professional opinion as a SSD reviewer, the guy who tests more consumer SSD's than anyone else in the world."

I posted some other links in this thread comparing asynchronous vs synchronous NAND:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/solid-state-drives-ssds-flash-storage/724026-mushkin-atlas-240gb-msata-ssd.html

 

thanks for this. is asynchronous mlc only a problem with reliability? as long as I can get it replaced for free (while it's in warranty) reliability isn't an issue for me.

I just want something that's fast and overall responsive (not just fast when copying files though)

like I said my Verbatim feels sluggish, but I'm not sure if that's because it's SATA II

 

You also have the potential issue with the controller of the SSD. Most reliable drives (the ones that I always recommend) are from Crucial (Marvell controller, basically in-house), Plextor (Marvell as well), Samsung (Samsung controller. **Everything** in Samsung SSDs are in-house), and Intel (eariler drives used Intel controllers, now they use heavily-customized Sandforce drives). Most everyone else uses vanilla Sandforce drives (today, that's mostly the SF-2281) and while they're better than the first-generation Sandforce drives (which died left and right), I still wouldn't trust them for long-term reliability. And the other controllers (OCZ uses Indilinx, Corsair uses LAMD) are too new to determine anything concrete about their reliability. There's also the SSD companies that aren't so good with aftersales support as those four; OCZ is the absolute worse at this. Don't know about SanDisk's SSD support, though my experience with their other flash product support is so-so (gets the job done, but it could be quicker and higher-quality).

Note that one of Samsung's drives, the 840 (non-Pro), uses TLC flash instead of MLC, which has a somewhat shorter lifespan than MLC and doesn't have very high write performance (about ~250MB/s, whereas the 840 Pro and others typically have 500 to 550MB/s). However, if you're not doing a lot of writes to the system (aka, you're mainly using the laptop for basic tasks like Internet, watching movies, listening to music, etc), then this is less of an issue.

 

The problem with asynchronous NAND is performamnce.
The Sandisk IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) are very low; Random 4K Read: 8000-IOPS, Random 4K Write: 2100-IOPS. The random IOPS numbers are primarily dependent upon the internal controller and memory interface speeds. Asynchronous - slower memory = lower IOPS.

Asynchronous SSD = inferior performance but cheaper
Synchronous SSD = superior performance and more expensive (but the price is getting closer)

 

so for overall responsiveness, I'm looking for the 4k read/write IOPS over speeds?

 

IOPS are speed, (operations per second). The number would not impress anyone if they express it in MB/s Megabytes per second)
The Sandisk 8000 Read and 2100 write converted to MB/s looks like this.
Read Write
8000 x 4 / 1024 2100 x 4 /1024
32000 / 1024 8400 / 1024
31.25 MB/s 8.20 MB/s

Those numbers are peak performance, probably at a Queue Depth of 32 (QD32) on an empty drive and a synthetic benchmark.

[H]ardocp
HARDOCP - Iometer & Steady State Testing - Plextor MP5 Pro Xtreme 256GB SSD Review

From the link on testing methods:
"The speed of SSDs keeps the QD so low that we will be testing from QD1-6, as users rarely, if ever, go over this level for any appreciable amount of time."

TweakTown
Plextor PX-M5M mSATA 256GB SSD Review - Benchmarks - Anvil Storage Utilities :: TweakTown

From the link:
"I've added a red border to the lower queue depth IOPS read / write charts to show the areas we are more concerned with. Companies like to talk about their high queue depth IOPS performance, but most of us will never queue enough data to hit 100K IOPS. If you are shopping for a consumer SSD, you want to look at low queue depth performance."

An explanation of IOPS sequential and random:

IOPS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The overall responsiveness is a balance of sequential read/write, random read/write and latency (access time). And not on a fresh drive. It will be a used drive pretty quick and the performance will change. I give more weight to "Real World" testing like "Steady State" on [H}ardocp, "Drives with Data Testing" on TweakTown and "workload testing" on AnandTech and others.

 

As far as I know, sandforce drives are the most trusted ones due to their innovative build & design quality. The firmware is also very intelligent to get acquainted to any kind of SSD maker hardware.

 

Umm, what? Have any links to back up your claim?

I've seen some very interesting pro-Apple and pro-Alienware comments, but this takes the cake...