What is the best SSD I could buy right now with almost the best performance and price ?

I'm planning on buying an ASUS N55SF laptop and gutting out the HDD for an SSD based on recommendations over here!. Im planning to purchase it 2 days from now so the more feedback I get the better my choice will be . My maximum storage will be 256gb due to financial reasons but I'm willing to purchase a 120gb ssd if the performance was dramatically better.

Happy new years <3

 

My choice would be a Samsung 830 or a Crucial M4.

 

What do you think of the OCZ Vertex 3 found in this link

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technolog...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1325419478&sr=1-1



It provides 500 MB/s write speed on 6Gbps SATA speeds. Does the N55SF support 6Gbps ?

 

You can see dozens of threads, that are complaining about OCZ drives. I wouldn't buy it for sure. What I can suggest is Samsung 830 or Crucial M4. (Samsung one is faster). Your notebook has HM65 chipset, it should support SATA3, check this thread out: Intel HM65 Chipset+ SATA III?

 

The best performance SATA3 SSD right now is the Intel 250GB 510 Series. Intel also happens to have the best reliability and longetivity of any SSD currently selling.

The best bang for the buck with reliability and performance (in that order) is the Crucial M4 256GB model. The 128GB Model has the same performance as the larger capacity version (very unusual in SSD's...) but the larger capacity will allow you to partition your drive to leave more nand unallocated (and helping keep the performance as high as possible with as little extra WA wear too).

I would ignore the Samsung 830 as reports show that depending on your use (how hard you push it...) you can back the 830 into a corner that it cannot recover from (essentially a very useless SSD for a power user...).

As to the Vertex 3 - run far away from the garbage that is OCZ and SF.

Good luck.

 

Could you elaborate? I haven't heard of that so far. I just switched from mSATA+HDD to the Samsung SSD 830. I need an 7mm SSD on my Thinkpad X220, so most of the other drives are not an option. Should I regret getting the Samsung now? Well, so far I wouldn't consider my SSD to be in power use.

As for the Crucial M4, there seem to be more bugs coming in: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...lash-storage/636501-ssd-pick.html#post8211670

 

There are indeed a strange stuff going on when you push it to the limits. I saw 2 reports so far, both user using stuff that writes LOADS of data. One of them are using a 64 GB drive for write endurance test. So far more than 190000 GiBytes were written to the drive during 30 days (you do the math, it's more than 6300 GiBytes during one day, the whole SSD got rewritten 100 times a day) and it became half as slow as before (but it's still rock stable!). Would you call that normal usage? Not really.

Think about it, a 128 GB drive has much more durability for writes (maybe double? I am not sure). I bought a 128 GB 830 for myself 2 days ago, and I'm EXTREMELY happy with it. I wouldn't regret it for a second.

As for the Crucial M4, loads of threads opened in the past days reporting that the drive just dies above 5200 work hours.

Edit: you can follow the write endurance here, very interesting topic: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page126

 

I am over the moon with my OEM versions of Samsung's 830. I have two 256gb PM830's in a raid 0 array and they absolutely FLY.

If the kind of "abuse" mentioned above is the only thing that people are complaining about with them, I would ignore it - I mean, thats like leaving your system running Furmark for a month and then complaining that your graphics card has burned up!!

 

I totally agree. It's almost continous writes, without any performance optimization, break, like it's nowhere to a real world usage. It must be noted that other drives like Corsair Force, and Intel drives, or the Crucial M4 does NOT show similar behaviour during the endurance test, but still. I absolutely does not care, It's kinda hard for any user to write that much to a system disk.

 

I've heard of stability problems with the Crucial M4:
Stabilitätsprobleme bei Crucial-SSD m4 | heise mobil
(Sorry, I have no English speaking source at hand but Heise usually is reliable. One could call it a German version of Slashdot.)

The article mainly says that some of these SSDs will stop responding within one hour of operation which under Windows leads to a BSOD and only a reboot can temporarily make the SSD work again (until the next BSOD). The reason for this behavior is unknown so far and it's independent of the firmware version.

 

Crucial M4 on sale at NewEgg and Amazon, 128GB for $185 shipped.

 

The symptom you described (BSOD after one hour) seems to indicate that the article is referring to the issue where the drive fails after passing 5200 hours.

I posted a couple of links to other forums discussing about the issue here.

To be fair, the issue only recently cropped up and for all we know, it might be something that's easily fixed with a new firmware release. Not much information about this at the moment though.

 

Yes, it seems to be the same problem.
Maybe the forums you linked are even the original sources of the Heise article.

 

Looks like Crucial came up with a fix. Crucial Forum - BSOD Crucial M4