A Beginner's Guide to Choosing a Solid State Drive [SSD]

[drmonsta]

If you look through tiger direct or newegg often, you will see that SSD's are becoming very cheap compared to what they once were. It seems every week there is a deal for a 120 gig SSD for 70 bucks.

 

[thelostswede]

Just because your motherboard is SATA 3Gbps doesn't mean you're limited to SATA 3Gbps SSDs. You can get pretty much anything, but you'll be limited by the SATA interface on the motherboard.

What are you planning on using it for? Just as a boot drive with some general applications on it?
Best bang for your buck right now appears to be the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226247
It's not cutting edge, but more than fast enough for your system and cheaper than most SATA 3Gbps equivalents. It also means that when you upgrade your system, you'll get a performance boost from the SSD for free.

That said, for another $22, you could get the 128GB SanDisk Ultra SATA 3Gbps http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171545
which I personally would get if I was on a tight budget, as although OS X takes up a lot less space than Windows 7 for example, once you start installing a few programs, that 60/64GB SSD won't last all that long.

What is a good "and not very expensive!" SSD drive, that is Sata 2 (3 Gb/s), which is what my motherboard can handle, and of small size "i.e. 64 GB"?

Another point, do I have to reinstall the whole system? or is there an easier way?

thnx

 

[guiscard]

Have you checked if they have a firmware upgrade for it?

I just checked and they do. I'm running 2.1 and 4.2 is out. I'm in the middle of a couple of projects though, so I'll do the update when they're done and I can risk downtime.

Thanks for pointing it out though. I'm new to SSDs and it would have never occurred to me to look for firmware updates to hard drives.

 

[thelostswede]

If you're not on a super tight budget, can I make a suggestion? Have a look at the Plextor M3 Pro http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249020
It's using a slightly updated version of the Marvell controller, a custom firmware and much faster DDR3 cache. Anandtech has a few benchmarks that should convince you to go for this over the Crucial m4 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5851/plex ... 6gb-review

The only time you can really notice a slow-down on SanForce drives is if you run benchmarks, or when you do SSD to SSD transfers over a high-speed interface, but no, the slight performance drop is generally not something you'd be aware of, but I wanted to mention it due to a lot of people complaining about the lower performance of their SSDs compared to the manufacturers claims.

Great article! You dont even know how helpful was this for me actually! I am building a machine for video streaming based on SSD and I was thinking OCZ or Crucial and now I know it will definitelly be Crucial m4 Thanks man!

I am using a Kingston Hyper X in my MBP 13" and it works like a charm. Maby it is slowing down or what, but I dont believe one is capable of noticing such a drop when using the SDD as a system drive and just doing the everydays work...

Cheers!

 

[Melete]

Loads of great info as usual. Thanks.

Gonna be ordering/building very soon (waiting for ML, Gigabyte etc lalala) so am wondering - currently which SSDs are the best for a high performance, operating system only, setup? Im thinking in the 240gb, sub £400/$500 range (Vertex 4 being my current choice not really based on anything other than I could just about afford one).

I have used OCZ Agility 3s for 10months or so in two MacBooks and have been happy with the price/performance on a medium day to day usage. One of my laptops has an optibay conversion so only holds OS on the SSD and the other I did a straight swap (HDD for SSD). I always back up both laptops with Time Machine and a separate backup of home folders.
My main questions:

What are the 'real world' life expectancies for current SSDs? (I realise this maybe unanswerable!)

Would I see a big difference in lifetime between the two SSDs used in situations described above?

How catasrtophic is SSD failure compared to HDD failure ie data recovery etc?

I've been lurking a while and really appreciate all posts in these forums. To return the favour I will post my user build very soon. What an excellent community.

In advance, thanks for any replies.

 

[thelostswede]

Wow, loads of questions to answer. I'll do my best, but I'm not sure I can provide answers for everything.

If you're holding off your purchase, it might be interesting waiting for Corsair's new Neutron series of SSD's, see here for a few more details http://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-d ... -and-more/
It's based on an SSD controller from a company that has previously only done controllers for Enterprise solutions and they were recently bought by Hynix if I remember right.

Real world life expectancy is nigh on impossible to calculate, as it comes down to multiple things. Key factors are 1. the manufacturing process of the NAND flash, the more advanced (read smaller) it is, the shorter the life span of the NAND, as the logic gates burn out quicker 2. the type of controller and what kind of NAND flash managing features it has that makes sure that the data isn't written to the same memory cells over and over again and 3. what you use it for, the more read and erase operations you perform, the shorter the life of the NAND flash will be.

Note that most SSDs will last at least as long as the warranty, most likely much longer. Anandtech has something of a comparison you can have a look at here http://www.anandtech.com/show/5734/king ... ssd-review and they're estimating that an average user would burn out even the most basic SSDs in no less than eight years.

Again, I couldn't say, as it comes down to the above

Well, unless a memory chip or another component in the drive would fail (which could happen to a hard drive as well), which is very rare, the worst thing that will happen is that at the "end of its life" the SSD will become a read-only drive and it's meant to retain the data as such for about a year.

Hopefully this helps to answer some of your questions.

 

[Solidww]

Subcribing. Good knowledge!

 

[Melete]

I kept it as short as possible honestly!

Mmm food for thought... I grasp what you are saying, thanks for filling in the gaps.

I'll certainly look at the Neutron.

It seems like a bit of a mine field for the enthusiast who wants to understand/differentiate between which are the best with quite a few different combinations of storage and controller technologies.

Very much appreciated.

 

[arkmay_arsonspay]

Really useful information - thanks!

One bit of advice I've learned (from bitter-ish experience) is that because SSDs are so much smaller compared to the you may be used to, you'll need to think carefully about your partitions.

I bought a Crucial M4 128GB, and set up a 50GB OSX partition, and roughly split the rest between Windows, Ubuntu and an OSX 'testbed' partition. I had a 30GB SSD as a Ubuntu-only machine before which I moved elsewhere and used solely for Windows 7.
OSX installed fine, and I've got heaps of space left. Likewise with Ubuntu.
Windows7, however, only has around 28GB on both machines which I thought would be enough. A full new installation, plus motherboard/video drivers, plus updates and a new browser, and I was left with a little over 1 MB left. Yes, that's typed correctly - it wouldn't even open the uninstaller

The moral is either stick with OSX, or make sure that you sacrifice enough space for Windows.

Oh, and it turned out that the reason for the huge installation was because Windows creates a massive page file because I have 16GB of RAM, and a hibernation file. Yes, OSX has quirks, but I find them so much more agreeable...

 

[the_gael]

As others have said - excellent article - thank you