SSD for OS drive- Which and how big?

[Jocelyn84]

No, Samsung uses their own in-house controller. The Plextor and m4 use a Marvell controller.

Right, my bad

Firmware made it that much faster? I read somewhere that the M3 has 512MB where many of the other drives have 128mb. Is this true? That Plextor is looking sweeter and sweeter.

256gb and 512gb models have 512mb, while the 128gb has 256mb.

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[Sunburn74]

A lot of sites are recommending buying thebiggest drive you can afford. I personally wouldn't muck around with anything on a desktop smaller than 120gb. When you consider that you only get 90% of the advertised space (ie 111gb of actual useable space out of 120 gb advertised) and that windows will take up 20 gigs alone you can see how 64 gb can be a little cramping.

besides honestly, the best dollar/gig ratio are with larger drives.

I've been extremely happy with my vertex 3 drives (2 of them) and my agility 3 drive. I would also highly recommend any intel drive (having abused them for 3 years without any issues at all). I also would recommend any corsair SSD, again for the same (though they were in less rigourously used machines).

 

[exdeath]

A lot of sites are recommending buying thebiggest drive you can afford.

With the exception of a few recent hot deals, you generally pay MORE per GB with a bigger drive. Like everything else in this industry, linear gains cost exponentially more.

The reason enthusiast sites suggest going with larger drives is more the increased performance benefit of interleaving more NAND channels to the controller, more so than capacity or cost.

More NAND = more performance up until the point where the controllers channels are saturated and it starts costing performance with larger lookup tables, etc. while no longer adding channels to compensate.

Right now 256GB drives are the sweet spot dominating performance scores. 128GB models fall to the left of the bell curve and the 512GB models fall to the right of the bell curve. 128GB don't have enough NAND to make the controller work hard, and 512GB have double the NAND to search through while being limited to the same number of channels (why 512GB based models see IOPS nose dive off a cliff compared to 240 GB versions of the same model)

When new generation controllers have more channels, faster processors, more cores, and bigger logical to physical look up table caches to deal with 512+GB effectively and efficiently (and a new interface faster than SATA 6G emerges), we will start seeing easy 1000+ MB/sec 180,000 IOPS 512 GB SSDs.

 

[flexy]

64 GB for a Win7 partition is "just right"....but sooner or later you might discover you want your favorite, often played games on it also. 64gb is enough for win7 and maybe one extensive game like skyrim, bf3 etc.

Personally and with the dropped prices right now compared to when i got the 64GB drive, i would rather want a 120GB, have Win7 on it and ALL my favorite games and not worry.

 

[Charlie98]

Personally and with the dropped prices right now compared to when i got the 64GB drive, i would rather want a 120GB, have Win7 on it and ALL my favorite games and not worry.

Amen! brother.

The 120GB's are nearing the magical $1/GB threshhold...

 

[MrX8503]

Firmware made it that much faster? I read somewhere that the M3 has 512MB where many of the other drives have 128mb. Is this true? That Plextor is looking sweeter and sweeter.

The new firmware increased read speeds of the m4 from 400MB/s to 500MB/s

When you add in "possibly", "best drives" just becomes "popular drives". It uses the same controller as the m4 and 830.

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I said possibly because I haven't done research on the Plextor M3 myself. It having a Marvell controller, it probably is just as good as the M4.

 

[cytg111]

i'd go for the M4

1. you get a reliable drive
2. price is good

it's hard to put a price on number 1 ... the intels will get you same reliability but at a higher pricepoint .. i'd stay away from anything else.

 

[itakey]

i'd go for the M4

1. you get a reliable drive
2. price is good

it's hard to put a price on number 1 ... the intels will get you same reliability but at a higher pricepoint .. i'd stay away from anything else.

I went with this recommendation. It was a hard decision but for the extra few bucks it is hard to deny so many 5 star reviews all over the net. Hope it was the right choice and the drive isn't a brick Thanks for all the input everyone!

 

[Coup27]

what was the price difference between the m4 and the 830 of the size you chose?

 

[itakey]

what was the price difference between the m4 and the 830 of the size you chose?

Roughly $40+/-

 

[Obsoleet]

That Plextor is looking more and more appealing, especially with a lot of reviews saying it is solid, 5 year warranty, and priced decent.

I'll be running this on Windows 7 Professional.

So is the SSD Toolkit worth an extra $30 to $40? The 120GB Plextor is in the $150 range where the Intel and Samsung are more in the $190= range.

I think it's worth the extra. As the drive ages you might be thankful you went for one with good toolbox support.

Example are my Intel G2 drives. I've used them on many different machines, over the span of ~3 years now, and it's been a godsend. You don't know where you might migrate the drive in a few years.. if you get a reliable drive that is still running years later that is- you know know where its future might lie.

It's pretty nice having a way to schedule and run a manual TRIM and put performance back at 100% any time you want. I have my drives scheduled to run a manual TRIM every night, it doesn't harm anything. Without a toolbox there are some 3rd party apps that are more sketchy, but you are forced to wait for idle time to get 100% performance back.

I'm also confident Intel and Samsung have superior reliability to all the others as well. Not sneezing at the M4s though, I just wish Crucial had a SSD toolkit, no reason a good, large company like that shouldn't put one out there.