Best SSDs For The Money: August 2011

I have a lot of personal success stories with SSDs but here's my current favorite.<p>A few months ago I had to help one of our scientists (the company is called 5AM Solutions.. they the awesome) run a bioinformatic job written in Perl and R. As it turned out, for long stretches of the processing the job required around 20 GB of memory. The one server that had all the required dependencies installed had only 8 GB at the time.<p>When I let the job run the first time, it started to page out memory to hard disk. The job ran for about four days, was only about 25% complete and during that time frame the server was un-useable for any other functions. Pretty much everything came to grinding halt.<p>Between that first run and the time our new RAM would be installed, just for grins, I gave the system 30 GB of swap space on the locally attached SSD. With that configuration the job finished in 19 hours and during that time the server was still responsive of other tasks.<p>When we finally added the appropriate amount of physical RAM the job took only 15 hours to complete.<p>It is the first time I have ever seen virtual memory be useful.

Just a warning, a lot of these SSDs "cheat" by using compression. I bought the best drive that I could find for my macbook pro - OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, and was rather disappointed to find out that the posted speeds are based on benchmarks with compressible data. The reason this is an issue is because if you use disk encryption like you should be doing, encrypted data is not compressible. As a result, my speeds are 1/3rd to 1/2 of that which is advertised, and it was not worth the extra money.

I am surprised to see the OCZ drives recommended so frequently in the article. So far I've owned 2 from crucial, 1 intel, and 1 from OCZ. The first SSD drive I purchased was a crucial, and it is still running like a champ 3 years later in a macbook pro. The OCZ drive failed within 90 days. This wouldn't be a big deal in and of itself, things break. However, their customer service is terrible. I got nothing but a 2 week long run around with them when I tried to RMA it.

I recently bought a Crucial M4 256GB SSD, and I have been extremely satisfied. Blazingly fast and no issues whatsoever. Even better, on my late 2008 MacBook Pro model, I get SATA II speeds (3Gbps). Most other drives (e.g., OCZ Agility) will only be recognized as SATA I (1.5Gbps) on my Mac. This makes the Crucial drive literally twice as fast in best case scenarios.<p>As an example of the effects it has had on my computer performance, building my upcoming book (which invokes rake and JRuby) used to take 1m 30s on a 7200 RPM drive. Now it takes 15 seconds. Also, productivity apps like Office open in a split second.

We use the 600GB Intel 320's as second drives in Macbook Pros for running virtual machines. They're the highest capacity 2.5" SSDs available, and they aren't cheap. However, we can put multiple virtual machines with 100GB+ databases on them, travel to countries with poor internet connectivity, and teach workshops where the students run intensive queries. It's as if we've shrunk a $100,000 storage array and stuck it in our carry-on luggage.

I'm surprised that I'm not seeing even a casual mention of the OWC SSDs in this review. From everything (else) I've ever read, they tend to be way ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and performance. Sure, things change quickly stats wise... but they aren't even on the chart.<p><a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G" rel="nofollow">http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6...</a><p>Subjectively, I would describe my OWC 120GB drive as "blisteringly fast". Previously I had a 100GB OWC with extra redundancy for server loads (overkill in my iMac 2010) and the first time it booted it was like being personally greeted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If you use your computer for extended periods of time every day then their performance payoffs outweigh the $. They have come down quite a bit in price lately as well. As the article talks about there are many options available today from at least getting your OS onto a smaller speedy boot drive to housing everything on a larger one.<p>I for one initially had picked up a 60 GB OCZ Vertex1 awhile ago and then about 10 months ago moved up to a 120 GB Vertex2. Will never look back.

Judging SSD's by their little performance bits is a kind of amusing endeavor: the latest SandForce already saturates a 6Gbps SATA III link, and others are catching up real fast. This pretty standard unit of measure is hitting the limits of the interface, not the drive.<p>What other criteria are there? GB/$, performance/watt, watts at idle, IOps, and warranty or lifecycle costs. Personally, I find something "big enough", ignore power consumption and iops (neither is going to make a huge enough difference for me to concern myself), and then get whatever I can find that has the longest warranty.

I'm pretty happy with the 256 GB drive in my MacBook Air. I would have considered this limited until recently, but wireless networked storage is cheap and easy to implement(I basically just connected a cheap 3 terabyte drive to my router) and Thunderbolt or USB3 storage gives us a lot of options when more high-performance storage is necessary. Also, cloud services (Facebook/Flickr for photos, Rdio for music) have made me much less of a data packrat. So I increasingly consider the hard disk "working storage" for applications and the most crucial files.

I knew this would happen. I bought a Thinkpad T420s which has a non-standard (or new standard?) 7mm hard drive caddy instead of the much more common 9.5mm. I bought a 64GB Crucial M4 because it could be modded to 7mm and the price was right. I'm happy with the performance. It feels noticeably faster than a standard magnetic drive, but the 64GB is in tier 10 on this comparison. I guess as long as I'm happy with the performance it doesn't really matter. I wish this article was around 2 weeks ago.

I recently grabbed a 512GB crucial m4 for $730 delivered, from here <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bhphotovideo.com/</a> (no affiliation) (price has risen slightly since). For some reason I'd been putting it off but seeing it there for less than $1.50 per gig, at the capacity I wanted for my macbook, suddenly seemed to be a no-brainer. Hell, I remember paying $100 per gig back in the '90s. Somehow my mental model of "reasonable prices to pay for storage" has just been totally biased by years and years of dirt cheap HDDs.<p>Frankly it hasn't been the jaw-dropping entering-hyperdrive performance boost I had kind of hoped for (I'm a rails dev). While a definite improvement, it seems that for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU. But while it hasn't sped up all that much, it <i>never</i> slows down, which you don't notice at first but over time has a subtle confidence-building effect. Application launch speeds are much improved, for those who spend a good part of their day launching apps, which is not me. I tend to launch a few and then use them for the next two weeks before I restart. I also like how the drive does not make whining sounds when I move the computer before it's gone to sleep.<p>Recommended, anyway, they're cheap enough now that it's not a luxury, even if like me you use most of it for your work music collection.

There's a lot of snake-oil in SSD's until you hit the $400 mark. I'm not going near them until the lies and half-arsed chipsets stop.

I've been using an Intel 320. It's a dream. No more hitches <i>at all</i>.