Overall best SSD?

Hello,

I recently purchased a Sony Vaio SA290 and I have heard that nothing else dollar for dollar beats upgrading the HDD to an SSD. People said speed, boot-up time, multitasking, temperature, battery life, etc. were just some of the improvements and I decided to just get a 7200RPM drive from Sony and install and aftermarket one myself and save a couple hundred dollars. I'll probably stick with a 120GB SSD for now since they're still a little expensive.

My question is what SSD would you consider the "best"?
Best in this situation would be over-all, such as speed, pricing, and reliability.
I think that my SA does support SATA III also, so I'm looking for SATA III SSD's.

I am currently looking at the Kingston HyperX 120GB from Newegg that would be $175 after mail-in rebate. It has gotten great reviews and the theoretical speeds are nice too. Is this a good buy, or does anyone else have any other suggestions?

 

Crucial M4. Their 128gb ssd runs for about $200.

 

1) Yes, buying an SSD to replace a mechanical HDD is one of the best ways to spend money if you are looking to upgrade performance on your laptop.

2) The two drives I would go with are a Crucial M4 or Intel 320. The Crucial M4 is a no-brainer. THe Intel 320 is "only" a SATA2 drive, but will outperform many SATA3 drives because it has speed where it matters (random read/write operations). Plus, Intel drives are known for their rock-solid stability and reliability.

 

I have been using a Kingston HyperX 120Gb SATAIII drive for a couple months now and I love it. I have also used Intel drives and those work well too!

The Kingston drive is regarded as one of the fastest SATAIII drives on the market. But, pretty much any SSD you go with is going to be fast.

 

Well I just checked the M4 and their speeds are pretty low compared to the HyperX and OCZ (although everyone told me to avoid these because of the extremely high failure rates and BSOD's). The HyperX is also cheaper than the M4 with the new years rebate going on, and I'm glad that there's HyperX owner here that loves it! I might just be getting that then before the deals gone since no one had any objections against it, right?

 

I got a M4 because of the reliability, and SSD is going to outperform a HDD so why not get something more reliable. I'd avoid sandforce controller based SSD's as they have massive performance drops after time and have been proven to be unreliable.

 

Can you pick a best car OP? Is a Ferrari better than a Cadillac or a BMW? If you have a family or are 6'5" and weigh 250 a Ferrari despite its speed, still might not be the best choice. Although you're not the only one that would like a easy solution to all the numbers hype. It's a very common question.

Anyway, it is still possible for someone to get pretty close. Although I would still advise you to narrow the parameters a bit more.

One good place to start is by price or capacity. But to ask for one that is best would be near impossible since one might be the faster (by a fraction of a second) at writing, but may be slower at reading and cost a lot more.

The last review I read voted the Samsung 830 group best overall. But it only came as a 256 capacity, and was also the most expensive of the bunch. I shall anxiously await to see which one the others pick.

 

No objections? Yeah:

OBJECTION!!!

Don't buy SF based SSD's unless you're using your notebook system 'experimentally'.

 

They're really that bad?

I've only experience with Indilinx and Intel. Both of whom have done me right.

 

All that I have bought I've returned pronto.

Don't even have to wait for it to die - just see it slowing dowing to sub HDD speeds was enough for me to forget SF about a year ago.

I did get stuck with a Patriot Inferno which I used as a USB 'key' for a while - luckily, I got a chance to sell it (huge loss - it was $400) and haven't looked (seriously) as SF since.

As you may or may not know, SF is officially history anyways: LSI bought them out.

Not only did they shoot themselves in the foot, they also took a shot at their head too (good riddance, I say).

Either LSI is way smarter than the SF engineers (and SF can be fixed with a simple Firmware upgrade) or they will simply implement the ideas SF tried in a much smarter way (hopefully without having to resorting to lies about the performance that can be expected AND actually realized from such an SSD).

 

Well that's why I tried to define what "best" was a little more. My budget is only around $200 now after buying a new laptop, and my capacity for that budget is just 120GB. Now there is also speed BUT reliability to consider. I'm looking at the HyperX because their listed speeds are on the same levels as OCZ BUT the feedback is tremendously better. It is still rated 5 stars on Newegg, and I've read from the feedbacks that and update has been released that should fix errors if any were to even occur. The HyperX is $230 right now, but with the code EMCJHHA82 I got an additional $10 off, and there is $55 rebate going on also. This brings the total of $230 down to only $165 after mail-in-rebate, which I think is a pretty good deal compared to the $210 flat deal of the M4's. I know that the SF has been causing problems on the OCZ, but so far, the reviews and feedbacks of the HyperX have been more or less really good and I hope that they did the SF right this time around.

 

Look for intel deals on newegg.
160 GB 320 series (G3) SSD was sold for $165 a few days ago.


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I haven't purchased an SSD yet because of all this crazy talk. The last review I have rated OCZ at third behind Crucial’s RealSSD C300 and the Samsung. It got credit due to being best in price.

 

Definitely troubling. I've been away for months so I haven't kept up with the SSD scene. But Googling about, many stories echo the same sentiment as yours.

Intel had their issue this summer with the 8MB bug on the 320. But that appears to be fixed. I have a 120GB Intel 320 in my Elitebook 2760P. Issue free so far. My other notebooks have Vertex I SSDs and one Intel X25M G2. No problems there either.

Samsung SSDs seem to have their issues. In fact, in the HDX thread, one member reported issues with significant degradation in performance after just one day. There was no way to recover or restore to near initial performance. So he returned it.

All in all, the Intel SSDs seem to remain as the most reliable albeit not the fastest. But I'll take a hit in performance any day if it means significantly higher reliability.

 

Actually how I see it is that Intel offers the fastest performing SSD's that actually keep working (in almost any real-world workload).

Theoretical 'fast' is for the birds - I'm not going to be around long enough to wait for any fixes or make good on lies, er, I mean 'promises'.