New SSD for notebook Sager NP9130

[totopesce]

Hi

Im thinking of putting an SSD on my notebook (moving the HDD to the optical drive slot and the SSD where the HDD was), but where I live the prices and availability of SDD is quite bad, so I wanted some help choosing one

Here are the SSDs available in my price range and country,all 120Gb and approx price in dollars:

Kingston UV400 $50
Zotac T400 $55
Intel 540s $58
Kingstone hyperX fury $60
Corsair Force Series LE $60
Sandisk z410 $61
WD green $61
PNY CS 1311 $62
AMD Radeon R3 $62

Any suggestions?

 

[FFFF]

Kingston UV400 is a solid drive so no need to pay more for any of the others, surprisingly the worst SSD in that group is also the most expensive - AMD Radeon R3 which is basically the clone of the awful Crucial BX200.

 

[totopesce]

Thanks for the answer, any other suggestions to compare?

Edit: And what do you think of the PNY?

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Hi

Im thinking of putting an SSD on my notebook (moving the HDD to the optical drive slot and the SSD where the HDD was), but where I live the prices and availability of SDD is quite bad, so I wanted some help choosing one

Here are the SSDs available in my price range and country,all 120Gb and approx price in dollars:

Kingston UV400 $50
Zotac T400 $55
Intel 540s $58
Kingstone hyperX fury $60
Corsair Force Series LE $60
Sandisk z410 $61
WD green $61
PNY CS 1311 $62
AMD Radeon R3 $62

Any suggestions?

Depends, none of them are top performers as you probably are already aware of.

The SanDisk Z410 and WD Green have the lowest performance of them all so I wouldn't recommend them.
They would suffer a bit from voltage drift, even if likely not as bad as those using TLC NAND from SK Hynix or Micron.
The AMD Radeon R3 would also be affected.
The Intel 540s may possibly suffer from it too since it uses a similar controller (it uses the SM2258 while the others use either the SM2256 or the SM2256s) and SK Hynix TLC NAND.

Unsure about whether the Kingston UV400 would suffer from voltage drift since that depends on how good Kingston is at writing firmware for the controller.

The others use either Phison S10 or MLC NAND meaning they will not be as susceptible to voltage drift.

So if you want to avoid voltage drift you should avoid at least the ones using SM2256 or SM2256s.

Otherwise what drive will perform best will depend on what kind of use it will regularly experience.

But I think the UV400 should probably work.
Unless you really want to avoid voltage drift or the likely small performance gains you would get with some of the drives here are important to you.
Otherwise like the Zotac T400 or the Hyperx Fury would be alternatives.

Kingston UV400 is a solid drive so no need to pay more for any of the others, surprisingly the worst SSD in that group is also the most expensive - AMD Radeon R3 which is basically the clone of the awful Crucial BX200.

Actually the AMD Radeon R3 is neither a clone of the BX200, nor the worst performer here.
It is more like a clone of the Mushkin Triactor (or maybe vice-versa) with SM2256 as a controller paired with 15nm TLC from Toshiba/SanDisk.
Depends on how good the firmware is for the R3 but the Mushkin Triactor is one of the better SSDs using that controller.

And the worst performers here are instead the SanDisk Z410 and WD Green, since they use the same NAND but pair it with a DRAMless version of the controller used in the R3.

 

[VirtualLarry]

surprisingly the worst SSD in that group is also the most expensive - AMD Radeon R3 which is basically the clone of the awful Crucial BX200.

Actually the AMD Radeon R3 is neither a clone of the BX200, nor the worst performer here.
It is more like a clone of the Mushkin Triactor (or maybe vice-versa) with SM2256 as a controller paired with 15nm TLC from Toshiba/SanDisk.
Depends on how good the firmware is for the R3 but the Mushkin Triactor is one of the better SSDs using that controller.

I put a 120GB "Radeon R3" SSD into my i5-6400 OCed quad-core rig, and it seems like it actually performs really well. Way, way above a BX200. I think I benchmarked 400MB/sec random 4K QD32 reads, or close to it. That's phenominal for a SATA SSD, IMHO.

I actually think that it's one of the fastest SSDs that I've used.

 

[totopesce]

Couldnt really find a definition for voltage drift, something about the NAND degrading?
The use is mostly audio, internet some games nothing major, no video editing or the likes, its more for the OS and frequent apps and games than anything.

Not really looking either for the best performer, but a good one that will last

Thanks

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Couldnt really find a definition for voltage drift, something about the NAND degrading?
The use is mostly audio, internet some games nothing major, no video editing or the likes, its more for the OS and frequent apps and games than anything.

Not really looking either for the best performer, but a good one that will last

Thanks

Voltage drift is about data degrading (electrons escaping) which may cause read speeds to dropping due to the ECC having to work to correct for it.
Which can be largely be avoided or at least mitigated by:
1. Using some decent MLC NAND.
2. Using a large enough lithography.
3. Using a controller able to adjust for it properly (which the Phison S10 seems to be fairly good at).
4. Rewriting files suffering from voltage drift.

Concerning general performance most of them should perform pretty similar (aside from SanDisk Z410 and WD Green) since except for the HyperX Fury they all use TLC NAND with a small SLC-cache.
The HyperX Fury will likely perform better than the others do during more demanding conditions or while working with a lot of easily compressed files.

When it comes to finding one that will last any one of them may stop working after a single day or keep going for years.
I just don't think there's that much data on failure rates for different models to really make an informed decision about which is least likely to just stop working.

 

[totopesce]

Thanks for the explanation I think I will go with the Hyper X.

Thanks for all the help

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I put a 120GB "Radeon R3" SSD into my i5-6400 OCed quad-core rig, and it seems like it actually performs really well. Way, way above a BX200. I think I benchmarked 400MB/sec random 4K QD32 reads, or close to it. That's phenominal for a SATA SSD, IMHO.

I actually think that it's one of the fastest SSDs that I've used.

QD 32 is basically sequential.* Average the numbers for QD1/2/4 for a direct comparison to the numbers in the anandtech bench.

*not really but you know what I mean.

 

[FFFF]

Actually the AMD Radeon R3 is neither a clone of the BX200, nor the worst performer here.

Seems I was wrong about Radeon R3 being a BX200 clone, but the facts remain:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Radeon-R3-240GB-vs-Crucial-BX200-240GB/m134613vs3626

There, it's even worse than Crucial BX200 which is saying quite a lot.

The HyperX Fury will likely perform better than the others do during more demanding conditions or while working with a lot of easily compressed files.

Actually Intel 540s is much better than the Fury:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-540s-Series-120GB-vs-HyperX-Fury-120GB/m127931vs2586


But like I said, there's little to gain over the UV400 in real-world scenarios so it should satisfy totopesce's needs.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Seems I was wrong about Radeon R3 being a BX200 clone, but the facts remain:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Radeon-R3-240GB-vs-Crucial-BX200-240GB/m134613vs3626

There, it's even worse than Crucial BX200 which is saying quite a lot.

Yes, it does look to be a bit worse than the BX200 (even if I have seen it outperform an ADATA SP550 which is a bit better than a BX200).

It is still far from the slowest drive on the list however.
See: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7726/sandisk-ssd-plus-z410-sata-iii-review/index.html

That is what the Z410 performs like and since the WD Green is basically the same drive (if I recall correctly) it should perform similarly.

Actually Intel 540s is much better than the Fury:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-540s-Series-120GB-vs-HyperX-Fury-120GB/m127931vs2586

But that is the kind of benchmark that shows off drives like the Intel 540s (TLC with an SLC-cache) at their best and drives like the HyperX Fury at their worst.
Since the benchmark is so short you're measuring the SLC-cache on the Intel 540s but when that runs out the HyperX Fury may likely perform better due to MLC NAND and compression.
And that's the other thing: It looks like it (the benchmark) doesn't use a lot of easily compressed files which means this is a worst-case scenario (for the HyperX Fury) seeing as how drives using SandForce may not perform very well when they can't compress files.

 

[FFFF]

But that is the kind of benchmark that shows off drives like the Intel 540s (TLC with an SLC-cache) at their best and drives like the HyperX Fury at their worst.
Since the benchmark is so short you're measuring the SLC-cache on the Intel 540s but when that runs out the HyperX Fury may likely perform better due to MLC NAND and compression.
And that's the other thing: It looks like it (the benchmark) doesn't use a lot of easily compressed files which means this is a worst-case scenario (for the HyperX Fury) seeing as how drives using SandForce may not perform very well when they can't compress files.

Both compression and the pSLC cache or only relevant when copying or reading big files and during heavy workloads. Since OP wants a small 128GB drive, obviously he won't use it to hold big data. For OS workloads and loading programs the most relevant benchmarks are random read and mixed IO speeds at which you can clearly see Intel 540s performing significantly better.