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Hello there,
After setting up a new PC and ending up with some spare money i have decided after some thought to invest them into adding an SSD into the mix. The setup i currently have in mind is to run the ssd as the OS drive, two other hard disks on raid-0 for applications/games and a third drive for data.
My pc specs are:
CPU: Intel i5 2500k
MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P B3
RAM: 8GB 1600 MHz
GPU: MSI gtx560ti twin frozr
So, what I am really asking is any recomendation for an SSD for the intented use that will cost no more than 150$. I have also read some stuff about certain SSDs or controlers that have had reliabilty issues in the past that i cant really recall, so if i would have to make a choice between performance/speed or realiability i would choose realiability.
Of course any other kind of advice regarding the issue would be apreciated.
Note: I am from Europe so newegg etc prices or discounts or whatever dont aply to me 
Thanks for your time.
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Crucial M4 64GB, and put as many applications on that as possible too. I wouldn't bother with RAID0 for the other drives.
Initial firmware issues are over with the M4, so it's a good pick for reliability, and there's nothing in that price range with better performance without more reliability issues. Intel 320 80GB is slower and out of the budget range too.
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Crucial M4. Samsung 470 and Intel 320 are three quite reliable and usually affordable options. M4 is sata 3 and the other two sata 2. You mobo have sata 3 ports so if you can find the m4 for a reasonable price it might be a good choice. I have the Intel 320 myself and since it's my first it feels ultra fast even though it's not the fastest compared to other ssd:s.
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Crucial M4 is a really good choice, newer OCZ Vertex drives had some reliability issues, and the consensus at the moment is they are the riskier option (although the problems seem to have been fixed now), I would suggest going for the 120gig one (I have 2 Vertex 2Es in Raid 0), about half full (ie more than you'd want on a 60gig), and that's with only a couple of games installed. I had a 32gig one, and it was very frustrating moving stuff around all the time, 60 would obviously be better, but 120 is well within your price range.
edit: sorry, you said Europe, not UK, so price links aren't relevant
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The SandForce 2 drives had problems with stability when set as the boot drives. I recommend the Crucial M4. The Crucial C300 and Intel 320 are good drives too.
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On September 21 2011 02:44 Marquesz wrote:
The setup i currently have in mind is to run the ssd as the OS drive, two other hard disks on raid-0 for applications/games and a third drive for data.
Unless you already have the 2 HDD's you were planning to RAID 0, the ~$100 (or Euro equivalent) you could save by not doing that could go into a significantly larger SSD (something like 128GB instead of 64) - which will most likely be enough space for all your programs/games.
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Thanks a lot for the advices people.
After doing some reaserching on my own i have also come to the conclusion that the crucial m4 64gb should be the best option for what i am looking for. However i am getting a bit greedy and since i am fortunate enough to be able to purchase my pc parts at very low prices i am thinking after the research i have done into investing a bit more and getting the 128gb version of the m4.
The issue with that of course is that since i am bumping my budget up a little bit if this introduces new contenders for that price range.
Anyway i will probably find my own way from now on. Thanks again to everyone for the effort they put in helping me and to TL generally.
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Id suggest Mushkin Chronos 60 GB (assuming its in your price range where you live).
Thats the one im going for, and here (spain) costs 89 Euro. Prices in spain are a bit higher then in most of the world thou.
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The M4 holds up pretty well in that size category as well so I wouldn't worry about it. And I would personally recommend going for a 120-128 GB ssd. When I installed everything I use fairly often and windows 7 my ssd is 80-90 GB in use. I do have things like CAD and other programs in addition to games but for me a 64 GB just wouldn't cut it.
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Move the games to another drive? They don't really benefit all that much except for loading times.
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After reading some SSD guru recommendations the Crucial m4 128gig is the current best bang for buck all around SSD you can get.
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Can someone explain why they are recommending the Crucial M4? The Vertex 3 random write is like 3X as much. How can the Crucial M4 possibly be the better choice? O_o I mean, I realize I am obviously missing something since it seems like a lot of people agree. I'm just mega confused.
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On September 22 2011 13:50 Mohdoo wrote:
Can someone explain why they are recommending the Crucial M4? The Vertex 3 random write is like 3X as much. How can the Crucial M4 possibly be the better choice? O_o I mean, I realize I am obviously missing something since it seems like a lot of people agree. I'm just mega confused.
IIRC OCZs have had a bad rap for their reliability.
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On September 22 2011 13:50 Mohdoo wrote:
Can someone explain why they are recommending the Crucial M4? The Vertex 3 random write is like 3X as much. How can the Crucial M4 possibly be the better choice? O_o I mean, I realize I am obviously missing something since it seems like a lot of people agree. I'm just mega confused.
3X? Are you looking at say 64 GB M4 vs. 240GB+ Vertex 3?
128 GB vs. 120 GB:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/425?vs=350
edit: btw in the list, the super long list of 2GB sequential results are ATTO, so highly compressible data that SandForce drives can compress and move much quicker. With some real-world data, SandForce performance is much worse, very much in line with other SSDs of the generation, or a little worse.
Past a certain point and with relative performance in a certain range, home users are probably not going to notice a difference in performance, only if they get unlucky with a drive that has compatibility issues with their system (seems to be more common for SandForce drives like the Vertex 3) or decides to die. However, most users have no problems with any SSD.
Random write is important, but not as important as random read anyway.
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5930 Posts
SandForce drives get the extra performance through compression algorithms that other controllers don't exactly do. As I have said from the very start, I will never buy a SandForce drive for this reason. Intel and Crucial will always be my choices.
Despite the nice performance gains, its still heavily manipulating my electronic data. Personally, I don't even care about the performance gains, the Intel 320 is piss slow compared to these speed daemons yet I doubt anyone would honestly notice the difference. The bottom line for me is price and reliability and frankly there is no way SandForce drives are more reliable.
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Thanks, Womwomwom and Myrmidon! I'm gonna buy the 128GB :D
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On September 22 2011 14:13 Womwomwom wrote:
SandForce drives get the extra performance through compression algorithms that other controllers don't exactly do. As I have said from the very start, I will never buy a SandForce drive for this reason. Intel and Crucial will always be my choices.
Despite the nice performance gains, its still heavily manipulating my electronic data. Personally, I don't even care about the performance gains, the Intel 320 is piss slow compared to these speed daemons yet I doubt anyone would honestly notice the difference. The bottom line for me is price and reliability and frankly there is no way SandForce drives are more reliable.
Depends on your definition of "data" but I'd have to disagree here. To me the real-time compression just boosts performance (though for the uninformed, it makes for some very misleading best-case-scenario performance figures), so that's a good thing.
edit: on second thought, probably depends more on the definition of "manipulate." The data is the relevant stuff (payload of everything underneath) that's visible to the user, and there's not much room for interpretation there.
Compression is great. It's not like the information bits have been altered. I like zip/rar/tgz/whatever, or lossless compressed audio, or even lossy compressed A/V.
And if you're storing data on a platter or flash memory or a optical disc, your data is inevitably being interspersed with redundancy for forward error correction, thus altering your data in pretty much the same sense as compression. i.e. the operation is reversed without the data actually being changed. Well, you can say that compression and error correction are two opposite angles of the same problem.
On any SSD, they're screwing around with the physical locations of files all the time, anyway.
edit2: so anyway, I don't really consider one-to-one transformations (thus invertible) that are transparent to the end user, to be manipulations, or at least something to worry about or consider as undesirable. There's a whole bunch of that shit going on any time you pass around data, so an extra step by SandForce is meh whatever in my books.
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I've never seen that before, but it looks like the more expensive one comes with a CD and SATA / USB adapter (so a transfer kit) for helping you migrate data from say an old disc. If you don't need that, the other one is cheaper.
Should be the same SSD in both packages.
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EPT
