Looking for the best SSD w/ ~$250 budget.

I'm looking for a SSD for my laptop. I have dual hard drive bays, so capacity isn't much of a consideration, although I'd like it to be a minimum of 32 GB.
This would be mainly for the OS, plus a few other important programs. I hear random write times are very important for SSDs if the OS is going to be on them, but I'm not 100% on that.
My budget is about $250.

My current setup is: i7 2760QM 2.5 GHz, 8 GB RAM, GT 555M GPU
I believe my MoBo has SATA III (6 Gbits) ports.

Right now I have in mind the following, although I am open to other suggestions.

128 GB Crucial M4
Sequential Read: 500 MB/s
Sequential Write: 175 MB/s
4KB Random Read: 45,000 IOPS
4 KB Random Write: 35,000 IOPS
MTBF: 1,200,000 hours
Idle Power Consumption: 85 mW
Active Power Consumption: 150 mW

128 GB Samsung 830
Sequential Read: 520 MB/s
Sequential Write: 320 MB/s
4KB Random Read: 80,000 IOPS
4 KB Random Write: 30,000 IOPS
MTBF: 1,500,000 hours
Idle Power Consumption: 80 mW
Active Power Consumption: 150 mW

 

Can't comment on the Samsung 830 though IMO I'd go with the M4. Mainly because of real-world bench marks and reliability, though I hear the Samsungs are equally as good. I'd say both of your choices are good SSDs so it's more of brand preference..Crucial has more experience with flash memory though.

 

I would go for this Samsung, read the customer reviews:
Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC128D/AM 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Desktop Upgrade Kit

 

Samsung 830 +1

 

Samsung 830. Several tests showed it a bit of beats the M4. Check out the tomshwardware review recently.

 

Between those two (and even with the 5200 Hr 'bug' on the M4's... fix coming 'soon') I would still choose the M4 over the 830.

Depending on your specific usage, you can cripple the 830 to floppy drive speeds - unless you can leave the system on, but idle for days at a time.

Good luck.

 

Please don't exaggerate the situation, I don't think, halving the speed (250 MBps seq read, and 100 MBps seq write) is that horrible after writing 187 TiB's to a 64 GB drive. Yes, that's over 191000 GiB. It's like writing 64 GB to a 64 GB SSD every day for more than 8 years. Even the dude who endurance tested it admits, that it was being pushed very hard. He ran out of free space two times, while writing to the drive, disallowing the GC to work.

His words: "Look, it's pretty much impossible to get this to happen naturally." and "If this was a widespread problem, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung would have stumbled upon it already."

I totally agree that it's getting strange under crazy usage, but well, who on earth would use an SSD for this?

My 128 GB Samsung 830 has 134,5 GiB written in 5 days of usage, this includes a complete installation of Win7 X64, updating, installing, copying 2 VirtualBox machines (~20 GB) to it, and working since (web and Java developing), lot of browsing, and such.

I do not have any worries about the drive.

 

Not exaggerating too much:

See:
AnandTech - The Samsung SSD 830 Review



Can't find the thread with 6MB/s write speeds right now...

 

I think I've decided on the 128 GB Samsung 830. Got a few more days until I purchase though, so I'd love to get some more opinions

 

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Intel 510?? Largely considered to be OVERALL one of the best most reliable drives available...or wait for CES..and see what the Intel 520 will bring....

 

The Intel 510 Series 250GB SSD is the one I would have suggested... if the OP's budget wasn't ~$250, as mentioned in the thread's title.

 

I was talking about the Intel 510 120GB drive... It is well above the capacity he stated was necessary..and it can be had for $250...

 

I don't know much about SSDs so I'm probably missing something, but it seems like the Intel 510 doesn't really hold up against the Samsung 830.