SSD recommendation/question

[Delarock]

Anyone want to recommend an SSD? Crucial keeps popping up in all my searches.

A quick question... Why is it that certain drives have capacities that aren't multiples of 2? I get 64, 128, 256, 512.... What's with some drives being 180, 300, 120?

[Androidpk]

Corsair force series, awesome shit. Got one in my gaming desktop.

[Back]

I have a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 120GB in my desktop. Love it. $20 cheaper now than when I bought it back in March.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226236

Look for TRIM support if you run W7.

You won't need to drill holes in your computer because SSDs do not run hot.

[subzero]

A quick question... Why is it that certain drives have capacities that aren't multiples of 2? I get 64, 128, 256, 512.... What's with some drives being 180, 300, 120?

I'm guessing you meant multiples of 8? I should know the answer to this, but it's escaping me at the moment.

[Izalude]

Corsair is good once you upgrade the firmware. Before I updated the firmware, my rig was crashing every couple of hours. The best one you can get in my opinion is a Samsung. They have the highest ratings on Newegg.com of all the SSDs. I have a 120g samsung and a 120g corsair force 3 in my rig, and the Samsung is definitely the best. I haven't had a single problem since installing it.

[Ashliana]

Read this--just published yesterday.

http://lifehacker.com/5932009/the-complete-guide-to-solid+state-drives

You can get 256GB drives for about $230. The OCZ Vertex 3s are very fast.

To answer your other question:

"Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different than their widely understood meaning. One example is with personal computer hard drives. While a megabyte has always meant 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes in computer science, disk manufacturers began using the metric system (SI) prefix meaning of 10^6 (1,000,000). By stating the sizes of hard drives in 'megabytes' of 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576, they overstate capacity by nearly 5%. With gigabytes, the error increases to over 7% (1,073,741,824 instead of 1,000,000,000), and nearly 10% for the newer terabyte.

Seagate Technology and Western Digital, were sued in a class-action suit for this. Both companies agreed to settle the suit and reimburse customers in kind, yet they still continue to advertise this way.[5][6] To help combat this problem, a number of standards and trade organizations approved standards and recommendations in 2000 for a new set of binary prefixes, proposed earlier by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), that would refer unambiguously to powers of 1024.

These new units are numerically identical to the established computer science convention, easing transition. Other operating systems either continue to use the older computer science convention (Microsoft Windows), or have switched to the new units (GNU/Linux), which are numerically identical to the older convention. Thus disk hardware on these systems still reports the actual capacity, which is lower than advertised."

[Buckwheet]

I have replaced all my OCZ drives with OWC drives.

Edit: They are top performers, and the following tag line pulls at my bleeding liberal heart:

Designed and built in the U.S. from domestic and imported parts. They also offer 30 day no hassle refunds.

[Delarock]

I'm guessing you meant multiples of 8? I should know the answer to this, but it's escaping me at the moment.

Eh... Maybe you're right but I was always assuming that the number was some sort of exponential of 2. (Ugh math... I should be better at this.)

Thanks for the answer on that one. I just always remember the numbers being a certain way. I suppose I never flinched at the 300GB HD in my laptop... but I'm a lot more particular now.



Samsung is definitely the best

This answer may be a little techy for me, so I'll give the full story. I have an older laptop (Dell Studio 1737). It has been running fine, save the fact the battery has been dead for years, and I've been considering doing some upgrades to it. Here's my thing: I'd like to upgrade to Win 8 (I drank the Koolaid) and the newer version of Office (enamored by the cloud). I'm currently running Vista. I think the best way to upgrade is SSD.

I've been going to hardware-revolution.com because I find their articles to be objective and written well. There's a line by all Crucial SSD's (which has pretty much locked up Samsung as my choice):

Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, but poor long-term performance, not recommended for RAID.

So now my question is... Do I go with a Crucial for @$200, or do I spend another @$30 to get a Samsung, which does not have that "issue?" The money difference is negligible at this point, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be using RAID at all. Bear with me... What I was hoping to do was to install OS on SSD and use the HD as storage for both this computer and my other laptop. I've had this comp since 2008 and I have just barely crossed 150GB. From what I've read, I won't need to set it up in a RAID config... So if anyone can help me with this at all, I'd really appreciate it. I'm almost positive I'm going to go with 256GB, if that makes a difference.

[Buckwheet]

Just so you know that the site is not comparing all SSDs. I would look at http://thessdreview.com to get a much better comparison chart.

[Rinualdo]

I stay away from SandForce. Get a Vertex 4 instead of a 3 if you want cheap.
If you're really interested in a comparison, this is all you really need to review:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/buy-ssd-recommendation,3255.html

Also, check out dealnews.com for deals on SSDs.
For example, if you want the Samsung 830, they have the 128GB version for 90$ at Newegg:
New: Samsung 128GB 830 Series SATA 6Gbps Internal SSD for $90 + free shipping (http://dealnews.com/Samsung-128-GB-830-Series-SATA-6-Gbps-Internal-SSD-for-90-free-shipping/601974.html)newegg offers the Samsung 128GB 830 Series Serial ATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal SSD (http://dealnews.com/lw/artclick.html?2,601974,2268580), model no. MZ-7PC128B/WW, for $99.99. Coupon code "NESAM10" cuts it to $89.99. With free shipping, that's $0.70/GB and the lowest price we could find by $7, although it was a buck less four days ago (since expired). It features read speeds of up to 520MB/s and write speeds of up to 320MB/s.

256GB is overkill in terms of size for most people. Storage of that size is usually reserved for media files or other data types that don't benefit a ssd.

[Rinualdo]

Oh, I just looked at the computer you'd be upgrading. It's a Core2Duo. If you can scratch together a few more bucks, you would get a lot more bang for your dollar at upgrading the entire computer to a Sandy or Ivy Bridge i3. Several of the lower end ultrabooks start around 600$ and generally include a SSD drive or SSD cache/OS hybrid drive. All in all, you would see a lot more benefit both in terms of performance, battery life, etc... if your budget allows.

[Delarock]

I was under the impression that the processor and the graphics aren't upgradable because they are soldered to my motherboard.

I'm not looking to sink more than a couple hundred bucks into this. It makes sense to me to do SSD/RAM, but I can't justify much else.

I have a Sandy Bridge Zenbook as my portable computer. My Studio is a 17" desktop replacement.

[Bobmuhthol]

There's nothing that dictates a hard drive needs to follow a bit rule (2^x where x is an integer). You're thinking of RAM. And the answer is also not the difference between 10^3 and 2^10 -- that wouldn't make 320 GB a valid hard drive size since it would be neither 256 GB or 512 GB after the (1000/1024)^x correction.

[g++]

I was under the impression that the processor and the graphics aren't upgradable because they are soldered to my motherboard.

I'm not looking to sink more than a couple hundred bucks into this. It makes sense to me to do SSD/RAM, but I can't justify much else.

I have a Sandy Bridge Zenbook as my portable computer. My Studio is a 17" desktop replacement.

I think what hes saying is its kind of a lip stick on a pig situation. Your base system is getting old and the new generation of processors puts the old duel cores to shame. I would save up for a new computer rather than pimp out a old duel core but depending on your needs I guess an ssd with a duel core could make sense. For gaming I would just save up for a new processor personally but like I said if your playing gemstone or just want to boot really fast have at it.

[Delarock]

I totally get that. If I can get another year or two out of my comp for <$200, then I'm in. I think the SSD is the best way to do it.

I'll let you guys know how it turns out. I'm almost positive I'm gonna go with the Samsung.

[Delarock]

Totally worth it so far. Spend about $140 for the SSD and the mounting kit/adaptor. Installed windows 8 release preview and office. Working exactly how I need it to work.