Best priced SSD's? And are they worth it?

bluesnake

Fwor, did not the first ssd drive either come with 10 year or lifetime guarantee?

dan_w your old psu may not be able to push out the current for the newer boards and may not have the right connectors either. Plus the older cases had bispoke holes for ports, while newer case just have one big hole to for the onboard back plate

dan_w_3

Thanks for all the advice, I bought the 256gb Samsung 830 SSD today off Amazon for a sweet price of £145 (down from £339, not sure that's likely but still a good price). Although as you say ebuyer has wierd pricing it says under deals its about £143 but you add it to basket and it's £149.99, so played it safe with Amazon.
As I said at the beginning of the thread, I'm looking to replace my old desktop, but can't afford to all in one go, the idea is to get this SSD in, speed it up a little until I can buy the next bit, which is probably going to be the Case, then PSU, and worry about the processor later, (probably an i5). For now I'll limp on through with the trusty Dell

Richie-from-the-Boro

fwor wrote: »

My first SSD (a Kingston 16GB SSDNOW 100S) failed last week at a few days less than a year old.

My second (a Crucial M4) is still fine - though that in itself does not prove anything much, as it's less than 6 months old and gets a lot less use than the Kingston did.

I've now got to decide what to replace the Kingston drive with - and I was tempted by the Samsung, but Ebuyer's price is now £90, so maybe I'll just go for another M4. I've never understood how Ebuyer set their prices - at the moment a 64GB Samsung 830 is exactly the same price as a 128GB Samsung 830!

I can't speak for the Samsung, but all 4 of my Crucial[ s] have been well hammered workwise and are fine. I've have x2 C300's on one MOBO and x2 M4's on the other. I did swap them over once and the performance [similar memory interface] was almost identical whichever MOBO they were on, though the old C300 is no competitor for the M4, by this I mean the M4 outperformed the c300 regardless of chipset / MOBO.

Assuming a decent MOBO and BIOS with TRIM in good order I'm sure all other brands are close to the same reliability just not performance, most people don't need / want to load gigabytes of data in the blink of an eye. Power consumption at idle & load differers dramatically and heat has always been an enemy of these NAND circuits the budget end does:

- Kingston SSDNow S100 does 2.26/1.08
- Patriot Torqx 2 does 5.3/0.5
- while the Crucial m4 does only 0.15/0.65

The only other thing I considered was the 6 Gb/s, NCQ Momentus XT hybrid [or other brand] but those prices need to come down too,

sabretoothtigger

First Ive heard of sandforce problems. Whats the fix for that, I have an OCZ agility

Will win 8 help at all ?

DevCoder

You can check which Sandforce chipset (if at all) your sad has here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce

and OCZ update (if affected) is here
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4973/sandforce-identifies-firmware-bug-causing-bsod-issue-fix-available-today

sabretoothtigger

Thats the one

fwor

bluesnake wrote: »

Fwor, did not the first ssd drive either come with 10 year or lifetime guarantee?

No - AFAIK, Kingston drives of that type only have a 3 year warranty.

Not that I'm worried about it - it's less than a year old, and Ebuyer have always been very good about warranty returns.

A bit irritating that they don't sell the 16GB size any more - it was great value at only £31, and as it's just for use as a Linux boot drive, anything bigger is a bit of a waste of money, although quite often it's true that the larger size SSDs have better performance than smaller ones of a given make...

sabretoothtigger

£31 is not far off the prices Ive seen for normal size drives now. 16 has become too small to bother, you can boot from a usb stick after all

fwor

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

£31 is not far off the prices Ive seen for normal size drives now. 16 has become too small to bother, you can boot from a usb stick after all

You can indeed boot from a USB stick, but if all of your system files are on it, you won't enjoy the experience! USB 2.0 runs at about a tenth the speed of SATA, and most pendrives can't drive their USB interface at full speed anyway.

16GB is absolutely fine for Linux - mine was less than half full when it conked out. Everything else other than system/application data is on a 1TB conventional drive, so I don't need anything bigger.

Dussed

I'd go for an OCZ Agility 3, I've have the 120gb one since February, and it hasn't had a single problem. I only experienced my first BSOD a few nights back, and that's because of a dodgey HD7970 driver. They're a good price on ebuyer.com right now, so go check it out.