Which SSD is good?

I've checked prices on some SSDs, provided I'm looking for a 60G - 80G one. Intel of course has high prices and I'm sure their products are reliable as well. I also saw the OCZ Vertex 2 ones; they are cheap and have fast speed for the price(280/270 if I remember correctly). But I can't say I trust those becasue I've never used their products before. Are they any good? Or are there better price-to-performance ones?

 

Anything that has the Sandforce 1200 chipset is awesome. This includes the OCZ Vertex 2, G.Skill Phoenix Pro, and OWC Mercury Extreme Pro. If you plan on doing RAID internally, I'd go with the OWC RE series, which have more ECC (at the cost of less storage space):

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Serial ATA 2.5" Solid State Drives using High Performance SandForce Processor solution

If you're just going with a single drive, the Phoenix Pros from G.Skill are pretty great - they have custom firmware from Sandforce that give you 50k IOPS, which is really nice.

 

Go to anandtech.com they made a good comparison between SSD. One of the conclusions was that while Intel has lower theoretical peaks it is much faster than the others for small files and it makes a better booting drive.

 

I love my SSD 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300. For $150 I couldn't imagine a better deal.

 

Really depends on what you will use it for. Some people require expensive SSD for its speed, an average user probably wont really need a 350MB/s read 200MB/s write. (If a couple second faster boot time means something, then I guess it matters)

An excellent one is SSD with Sandforce controller said above by kaidomac. In a recent review (forgot who reviewed, but I saw it around 2 weeks ago) out of 10 different SSD around 64-80GB, Crucial C300 is said to be one of the best.

If you want to save some money, you can get a Kingston 64GB V-series SSD for around 90 dollars shipped from specific places. It definitely is not the best SSD out there, but its decent for the price.

 

PC Perspective - SSD Decoder Ring - an SSD comparison guide (Rev 3.0)

Here is the most up to date charts.

 

Stay away from OCZ. I did some research on SSD's myself recently(well sort of). I just went to either amazon.com or newegg.com and just read all the customer reviews. I was blown away by all the negative comments especially against the OCZ drives. Many people complained how they had to have their drives replaced after only a short time. Crucial didn't have many bad reviews. A few people complained about having to return a defective product. Intel had MANY positive reviews so I naturally went with Intel. Good luck

 

Thanks for the replies. I'll mainly be using it as a boot drive while maybe installing a few programs for fast loading purposes.

 

Which SSD reviews did you check? Almost all of them are more than 60% 5 star review even for the old SSDs. Their SSD with the newest controller and improved speed are all above 70% 5 star.

Same with Crucial C300 (considered best in certain reviews). Out of around 10 different C300 SSD on newegg, there are around 5 people who says bad product or DOA. Also remember that there are not a lot of people who write reviews even when they have a good product.

@physib

How much are you willing to spend for the SSD?

It does not seem you will really need a very expensive SSD. Someone who uses it for basic purpose probably wont see that much of a visible difference between a 250 and 350MB/s read. (excluding benchmarks) Do remember I mean average user.

Two recent review:
Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up : Tom?s Hardware Mainstream SSD Shootout (Too expensive for you as this talks about 256GB SSD)
Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up > Final Thoughts - TechSpot ( (Good review for you)

Best budget SSD would be

Buy.com - Kingston 64GB SSDNow V Series SATA II 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

If you dont mind spending more, there are many more option at around 120-130 dollars.

 

It's true that all the drives will have some defects among them. I guess I just felt that Intel had less people complaining over defects. I also read that some of the cheaper(less expensive) brands like OCZ use a lower quality NANO which gives it a lower life span(less read and writes).

On a different note, Does anyone know if the X-25M intel drives that are sold at Xoticpc are G2's or not?

 

Cant say much about life span as SSD havent really been tested in terms of that. Most SSD can stay at the same speed as long as you use it properly. Lots of companies with a forum has an area that talks of about tuning their SSD right after purchased.

Also regarding your X-25M. Why dont you consider buying from a different source as Xoticpc or any place to purchase laptop with an option of adding SSD are a lot more expensive than buying them individually.

 

As far as I am aware, there is no limit to the number of reads with regard to SSD's, whereas there is a limit regarding the number of writes. However, wear leveling algorithms take care of this for the most part and automatic marking of worn out sectors is built into the drive logic. If you suddenly notice the total space of your drive shrinking by an appreciable amount it's probably a good sign that your drive is indeed going to fail soon, but I have yet to read any reports of this happening, even among the 1st gen SSD's, except in labs where they specifically used them for tasks that are meant to wear the drive out.

 

Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up : Tom?s Hardware Mainstream SSD Shootout

 

My OCZ 32GB Vertex died on me while I was reinstalling Windows - one second its chugging away like usual, next second BOOM, it just stopped installing the screen went black and that was it. After that the drive couldn't even be seen in the bios. I haven't gotten around to jumpering it and seeing if the drive is salvagable, but I'm kinda pissed that it didn't last longer than a year for me. Well, if I can't revive it I might get another one for a boot drive - I hate working with a Windows that sits on 5400 RPM

Guess I'll go with Intel next time though.

 

Sorry bro. This is the kind of stuff that I read about in other people's reviews. The longevity or reliability of these OCZ drives seems to be lacking to say the least.

 

Why do you prefer 'G.Skill Phoenix Pro' over 'OWC Mercury Extreme Pro' for single drive use ?

 

Using an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB here and it's fast. So far no problems.