Which SSD?

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,218
Hi guys,

Looking to get an additional SSD for games. I've got an OCZ Vertex 3 at the moment as a cache drive accelerating a conventional RAID-0 array. I'm happy with this setup.

I'd like to add an additional SSD but I've no idea what to get or how much to spend. At the moment I'm wondering about getting a 128gbish drive with a view to buying another the same when the need arises and eventually ending up with a RAID0 array. This seems to be no more expensive than buying a 256gb drive.

But there is so much choice - currently looking at the Samsung 830 which is £83.99 for a 128gb version. Is there a better choice? Should I spend more?
 
The larger the drive is, the faster its write speed seems to be. The 256gb version is some 80mb/s faster. Why is this and does it matter?

The Samsung drive appears to be slower than my existing OCZ Vertex 3. Is this the case? Should I just get another Vertex 3?
 
With SSDs it's not really the max read/writes you need to worry about, it's the 4k read/writes that matter the most, that's where you will see a difference between the two in actual use.
 
Mind if I throw the Vertex 4 into the mix, I am torn between the M4, Samsung 830 and the similarly priced Vertex 4 which may be on sale somewhere at the moment.
 
Terminel said:
Mind if I throw the Vertex 4 into the mix, I am torn between the M4, Samsung 830 and the similarly priced Vertex 4 which may be on sale somewhere at the moment.
Click to expand...

I just grabbed a 240gb vertex 4 for a very choice price, my first foray into ssd's. 5 year warranty and what looks to be very good performance. Hopefully it will be a real eye opener for me. :)
 
So the new Vertex 4 is 120k IOP/S whereas the Samsung 830 is only 75k. How much of an issue is this likely to be?

How does the Sandisk Extreme measure up?
 
Hmm, just checking out reviews and the Sandisk Extreme is coming out really well - infact it seems to be one of the highest performing drives on the market?

It doesn't seem to get mentioned much round here?
 
Reliability ranks very high for me as well so would be willing to sacrifice some performance and know my drive will not fail a year down the line.
 
I'm still quite torn. I'm concerned about how the Samsung seems to suffer against the Sandisk in this review:

http://www.storagereview.com/sandisk_extreme_ssd_review

Also, is it worth RAID0 with SSD's? I note the Sandisk 120's are about half the price of the 240, so for the same money as a 240 I could have a 2x120's in RAID0.

Is that going to yield any sort of performance benefit or is it fundamentally pointless?
 
it depends how reliable the sandisk is compared to the samsung,in those tests it beats the sammy,raid 0 will be quicker but only z77 chipsets support trim in raid atm
 
i have no idea aswell,they are both newish drives,havn't come across any dead ones on here yet though

both use toggle nand,just that samsung uses its own controller and the sandisk uses sandforce
 
I'm just a bit concerned about some of the performance differences between the Samsung and the Sandisk in benchmarks. But then I don't want to buy based on benchmarks, but then neither do I want to buy the slower drive if thats what the Samsung is. Hmmm.
 
As I've already said, you're really not going to notice in the real world.

What are you doing that a SSD RAID0 would be beneficial?
 
its a hard choice and i love samsung drives,i doubt youd notice the difference tbh,i cant even tell the difference between sata2 and sata3 speeds regarding ssd's

just go with whatever fits your budget best
 
[TW]Fox;22763814 said:
I'm just a bit concerned about some of the performance differences between the Samsung and the Sandisk in benchmarks. But then I don't want to buy based on benchmarks, but then neither do I want to buy the slower drive if thats what the Samsung is. Hmmm.
Click to expand...

I got a Sandisk Extreme when I saw a very nice deal so did some reading up.

I could not find any review that put me off either.

Can't tell any difference between the Sandisk and my M4 in use tbh.
 
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