SSD Advice

nheather

nheather

nheather

Associate
Joined
19 May 2004
Posts
1,035
Location
Horsham, West Sussex
Hi,

I'm remotely interested in adding an SSD as my boot drive on my PC.

128GB would be fine.

Not sure what my motherboard supports off-hand but I wouldn't be surprised if it is only SATA-II - I will check tonight.

The thing is I don't know enough to determine which is a good one. For example you can get a Sandisk SATA III 128GB for £50 delivered which sounds very good value but I suspect that it is not particularly fast.

Looking at the advised read/write specs it looks good but I'm old enough to know what is advertised and what is delivered are two different things.

So how do I know what would be the best to buy.

I'm not looking to spend huge amounts but say that the Sandisk was £50 and there was a much better one for £80, I would go for the better one.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
theres two types of sandisk drive,the ultra which is slower than the extreme version,whether it matters on sata2 ports idk but if the extreme isnt much more id plump for that
 
There are three as far as I can tell

Just Sandisk SATA III 128GB

Sandisk Ultra SATA II 120GB

Sandisk Extreme SATA 6Gb/s 120GB

The first is the cheapest and on paper faster than the Ultra but I guess that is SATA III vs SATA II sepcs.

They are also paper specs so doesn't mean that;s how it will be for real.

Not tied to Sandisk by the way, that was just an example.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
most youll see on sata 2 is around 250/270mb read/write,thats with a sata2 or sata3 drive,just go for the most popular and best price
 
If you're stuck with a SataII mobo (3gbps) you can get away with the older, cheaper drives, which can be real bargains (I paid OcUK £44 for a 120gb OCZ Vertex 2E, ideal for an old laptop).

But if your mobo supports it, or you plan on upgrading, a SataIII SSD is the way to go. Don't be drawn in by the headline speeds, all Sandforce drives quote 500mb/s read and write but vary greatly in performance. And some "slower looking" SSDs perform better in real-world tests than the benchmarks suggest.

Best/expensive options :
Vertex 4, Neutron GTX, Intel 520, Samsung 840 PRO (coming soon...)

Good/cheaper options :
Corsair M4, Samsung 830, Intel 330 + loads of other Sandforce drives with sync/toggle NAND

Fair/cheap options :
Sandforce drives with async NAND, SataII drives

Personally I'd avoid OCZ and Sandforce SF-2281 drives, but that's a whole new thread...
 
Any SSD you buy will be a massive upgrade over a mechanical drive. I can't stress enough how much difference even a basic 'slow' ssd will have over your mechanical HD.
 
Just checked my motherboard.

It is SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s) and I've not got any plans to upgrade it at the moment.

So what would you recommend?

Cheers,

Nigel
 
I'm running the Sandisk Extreme 120GB SATA 6Gbps SSD as boot drive on a SATA 3Gbps mobo.
No problems here and I use a Vertex 2 as my games drive.

Sandisk Extreme connected via SATA 3Gbps.
 
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