Best SATA3 SSD for NP8150 as a main drive speed+size/money wise?

I can sacrifice reliability as long as the customer service is right.
There will be no sensitive data on my main drive.
Laptop will be used for casual gaming and heavy browsing mostly.

Suggestions?

Looking to spend up to $300.

 

We always recommend Intel, can't top their stability and they are right behind OCZ.

 

That's what I thought - either Intel or OCZ. What about Crucial RealSSD?

 

I'm buying the Crucial M4 128GB next week. It has Intel's reliability and a lower price.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Another vote for Crucial drives - either C300 or M4. They use Marvell controller like Intels and they are available at much better prices and are faster than the current Intel SSDs.

 

C300 is actually faster than the M4 in certain kinds of tasks like random writes. Do some research and see which you prefer. C300 is often on sale.

 

plus I think C300 has 34nm cell vs M4 26nm the former supposedly having more write cycles than the latter...

 

Bought used C300 256GB off ebay for $285. Hopefully it wasn't "too used"...

 

The Fastest SSD right now the Vertex 3 the 120GB sometime goes on sale for 265. Once on tigerdiect.com and recently buy.com They havent release a smaller version yet.

If not get a smaller size ssd like crucial M4 and use it to run OS and some Apps. Buy ODD Caddy(it replaces your DVD drive and allows you to use a extra hard drive) and use your stock hard drive as storage and also installing apps you dont use often. As for you DVD you can buy case for it and use it as a external DVD drive when you need to install something.

M4 SSD around 120-140 dollars
ODD Caddy from 15-50 dollars
8GB 1600mhz Ram 95-100 dollars
DVD Enclosure 15-40 dollars

As for I am currenty using 55GB SSD from OCZ. Which I for 79 dollars after mail in rebate. I brought ODD Caddy from ebay for 12 dollars came from china. I wasnt a perfect fit but I modity it to work flawless. I brought Patriot Ram for 95 dollar. DVD enclouse i had one laying and I got it for free from newegg a few months back.

So I spend around 187 dollars.

By the way?
Why did you RMA your laptop for? What was wrong with the LCD. I have one dead pixel but I been busy to do anything about it. Also I need the laptop for college.

 

Best SSDs For The Money: April 2011 : April Updates

Tom's Hardware best SSDs for the money. Their prices are a bit off however, if you look around you can get the drives they review for much cheaper.

I went with the 128GB C300. It often is on sale at Newegg for $199 in the past few months. Last week the 64GB C300 was $99 (not on sale anymore).

I was originally lusting after a Vertex 3 120GB but it has shown to be considerably slower than the 256GB version and is just not good value for the money. If you want a Vertex 3, the higher the capacity, the better the performance. OCZ also has had a bunch of issues with their drives (Vertex 2 chips fiasco) that have turned some people off their drives but they are still excellent and the fastest things out there right now in that price catagory.

 

You can check with CrystalDiskInfo 4.

 

As per my previous post - I already purchased Crucial C300 256GB SSD. eBay had a good deal. I already have a caddy for the second HDD and looking for a good deal on 1TB one. Do you know if 12.5mm HDD will fit?

I'm RMA'ing LCD only. Not laptop. I have 3 dead pixels cluster on it. And that's $210 upgrade screen. Had to purchase 0 dead pixels warranty do it though. Hate dead pixels with passion.

 

What's the worst case scenario I can expect with used c300?

 

The drives are still pretty new, it depends on how many write cycles it's gone through. It doesn't impact performance too much as all SSDs have a lot of provisioning in them (ie: they are actually much bigger than the listed capacity). The extra capacity is used to wear-level the drive as the SSD will balance out writes all over the drive and the extra room to provide backup space to lower the amount of writes to the usable portion.

A heavily used SSD will be slightly lower in performance and have a shorter lifespan.

SSDLife can estimate your remaining life.
http://ssd-life.com/

 

I've been using my 256GB C300 3 months and it has gone down 3 percent (165/5000 rated cycles).

Another C300: http://forum.notebookreview.com/7148891-post8600.html

 

Lol, I did do the research, trust me, I did

To me, the M4 is newer architecture, so there'll be more support for it, and newer firmware will possibly improve performance. Also, the differences between the M4 and the C300 are so negligible that it would not make a difference in real-world usage, at least as far as I would be able to notice it. And finally, at the time of this writing, the price differences are usually around $10, without special sales or anything.

I know I won't regret my purchase!

Mr. Mysterious

 

I've used my 128GB C300 for 1 month and SSDLife reports that I still have 8 years of life! TEC is estimated for 2019!

 

What percent is it at and how many cycles?

 

I don't have Crystalmark handy but I'll take new readings next week. SSDLife says the program needs about a week to calibrate to usage patterns.

 

If you click the S.M.A.R.T. button and then click no, you can link that page for all statistics.

eg: C300 256GB, M225 256GB

 

I did do that and everything was still 100 which is statistically insignificant and meaningless until it is used more.

 

If you check 173 AD Erase Count, you can see how many write cycles have been used.

On the C300 page that I linked, the raw reading is 165.

Your value should be something between 0-49 cycles. One or two graphs I saw had people who were lucky enough (or didn't write to their SSD much) and had theirs reading 100% even after a few months.

 

I have 1 erase count. I kind of want to make a lite version of Win 7 to try to trim 10GB or so off the installation. Unfortunately, that means a format and a rewrite of the whole drive as I will need to reinstall everything. I am afraid of doing that.

256GB is good but for a 128GB drive, saving 10GB on uneccessary Win7 things is a lifesaver. I'm down to 11.5GB free and I still have more apps I want to install

 

SSD section.

 

Memberate much?

 

Oh I didnt read the last post thanks for answerng my question What screen did you get the 95% gamut one? I'm thinking about getting one too later too. C300 256 is fast my co-worker has one it reads fast but doesnt write as fast but you only need fast reading anyways....

 

^ Yeah 95%, matte. Waiting for my SSD... Pain...