mSata SSDs

Going to get my t520 soon..
Thinking about upgrading to an mSata ssd.
Should i go with Inter 310 or other rebrands that are a little bit cheaper and much faster..
Suggestions?

 

Most of the non-Intel brands I've seen aren't any cheaper, unless you're not comparing equal capacities.

The Sandforce controller-based competitors offer additional speed. Intel, on the other hand, has the most reliable SSDs of anyone in the industry. That's not to say that other drives are bad, just that Intel has control of its own flash memory production and there are definite advantages to it.

I based my decision on capacity and price. Renice's 40GB and 60GB drives weren't as large as I'd have liked; they didn't have an 80GB model available (Intel did), and their 120GB model is $300, not an unusual price, but higher than I wanted to pay compared to $180 (plus a discount code) for Intel's 80GB model.

If Renice had an 80-100GB drive, or the 120GB model was less expensive, that might have changed my decision.

 

duplicate---

 

tktk, I already answered your original post. No need to post a second time.

You can also get a number of answers in the discussion thread in my signature.

 

Thanks, I will delete the dup post.

 

The 60GB is actually a good size, but im still concerned with the fact that its not a well known company. Just the whole idea of spending over a hundred bucks without any way to know how good the product really is.

And when i was talking about cheaper and faster ones, i was referring to a rebrand of Renice, myDigitalSSD.( MyDigitalSSD 64GB 50mm Bulletproof mSATA SSD | My Digital Discount)

 

About the Renice mSata, no 'official' reviews seem to be out yet, but you could start by reading these topics by users who already purchased and installed one:

- Renice X3 (SF1222) mSATA SSD User Review
- How to update ThinkPad X220 with mSATA SSD
- renice 120 gb msata ssd review

 

I'm not sure it truly is a Renice rebrand. The Renice K3vlar mSATA SSDs use a Sandforce controller. The drive you linked to uses a Phison controller. It's also 64GB; the comparable Renice drive is 60GB; they either use the same memory chips and different over-provisioning schemes, or have a different memory scheme. Either way, they are different drives.

 

so from i can see, SandForce is much more known and popular than Phison.
Whats the difference between them?
Tests from mydigitaldiscount:
Renice 60GB K3VLAR:
Price: 189.99(mydigitaldiscount)

MyDigitalSSD 64GB (Phison):
Price: 139.99(mydigitaldiscount)

Intel 310 80GB(Soda Creek):
Price: 189.99(newegg)


Im not sure how accurate those results are for comparison, but... What would be a better choice?

 

I am planning on getting an Intel whenever it comes back into stock... The Renice $/gb seems high for comparable performance to the Intel, and I just don't know anything about the MyDigitalSSD brand.

 

Intel's got the name and the money to back up longer warranties. (As well as owning many of their own chip plants.) If life and quality are your worries, Intel is the safest bet.

Sandforce (controllers, they get put in a lot of companies SSDs) got known because they were the first really competitive controllers to Intel's. They are economical and fast. Note that both speed and disk size are not constants with a Sandforce controller: They compress data on the fly. If it's less compressible, things will be slower and take up more space on the disk.

Phison I haven't seen any major reviews about yet. I assume they use a more standard methodology than Sandforce. The question is whether they preform the same when full as they do when empty. (A major problem for first-gen SSD's was that performance degraded significantly as the disk filled up. A full, fragmented gen 1 SSD could be outperformed by a standard hard drive. But that was gen 1, two cycles ago.)

For what it's worth, I just gave up on my first mSATA order and ordered one of the Phison drives. I should have it in hand tomorrow: I paid for expedited shipping.

 

Newegg.com - Intel 310 Series (Soda Creek) SSDMAEMC080G2C1 mSATA 80GB mSATA (mini PCIe form factor) MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - SSD

ETA 5/18/11 is now gone. Let's see if it'll be on sale soon, or if it's delayed again.

 

Thanks, that clarified a lot actually. And please tell me what you think of Phison when you get it.