Good Budget SSds..

[jime1]

I want to buy a budget 120GB ssd, My budget is about 4k /- o ($70)
Most of you recommended Kingston v300, but it's fishy :\
would you please recommend any other names ?

 

[Berryracer]

Slightly above your budget but this is performance king:

SanDisk Extreme PRO 256GB SSD

Don't go for 128GB bro, for SSDs to give you consistent performance, it is advisable to overprovision them by 20% so that 128GB if OPed, will be too small for anything useful and the price difference is not much for a 256GB SSD

Now if you want a bit cheaper, then the next recommendation is the Samsung 850 PRO 128GB

Avoid the crappy Samsung EVO series which is based on unreliable TLC NAND

and stay away from any Kingston SSD crap:

Kingston SSDs use the crappy SandForce controller which can only achieve the advertised speeds when it deals with compressed data. That's why on the box of my previous Kingston HyperX 3K SSD it said "These results were achieved with ATTO Disk Benchmark" because it uses compressed data. But in the real world, I was getting around 170MB Read/Write, no where near the advertised speeds. I would never use a Kingston SSD even if you paid me.

upgrading from ANY HDD to even the slowest SSD would be a night and day difference. ANY SSD will blow an HDD out of the water. But when comparing these crappy Kingston SSDs with the high performers such as Samsung840/850 PRO or SandDisk Extreme II / SanDisk Extreme PRO / Crucial M550/Crucial MX100 they would leave the Kingstons in the dust.

you never know how much faster it would be until you try it

Just my 2 cents worth

Benchmarks:

ATTO Disk Benchmark-Windows 8 IRST 11.5.0.1207 (results look fine since it's compressed DATA which most data usually ISN:T compressed so this Benchmark that Kingston uses is meaningless in the real world):

Now, a real world benchmark....... watch how the figures suck so bad in write speeds when data is not compressed

Crystal Disk Mark-Windows 8 IRST 11.5.0.1207

AS SSD Benchmark-Windows 8 IRST 11.5.0.1207

 

[Turab]

Hi Jim,

Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial BX100 are solid drives as well. And they are much better than Kingston's V300 both in performance and reliability

Both goes around 65-70$ recently.

 

[jime1]

Darn, I cant increase my budget and will get 120 or 128 GB only
I know the ssd in my budget will be fishy !! I just want to buy the most less fishy one...With Alright performance ! which should outperform my hdd
is transcend or ADATA any good ?

 

[jime1]

Hi Jim,

Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial BX100 are solid drives as well. And they are much better than Kingston's V300 both in performance and reliability

Both goes around 65-70$ recently.

Crucial might not be available here !
Samsung might be

 

[bbhaag]

Take a look at this one. It's within your budget and gets nice reviews. OCZ has come a long way since they were bought by Toshiba.
http://www.newegg.com/global/in/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228121

 

[jime1]

And Guys, my mobo has SATA II ports, so the speed are not going to be that fast, so recommend accordingly

 

[jime1]

Take a look at this one. It's within your budget and gets nice reviews. OCZ has come a long way since they were bought by Toshiba.
http://www.newegg.com/global/in/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228121

Looks great ! OCZ used to be fishy though , will consider :thumbsup: tysm

 

[Charlie98]

And Guys, my mobo has SATA II ports, so the speed are not going to be that fast, so recommend accordingly

At SATA2, just pick one that fits your budget, do NOT try to get a 'PRO' model or anything like that. Crucial, Samsung, OCZ/Toshiba, SanDisk, and, yes, even Kingston or Adata.

 

[ArisVer]

Since you are buying locally, get something with good warranty.

Being on SATA 2 (even SATA 1) does not matter much in real world performance. SSDs shine on accessing everything very fast compared to mechanical HDDs, it's like click and it appears on your monitor (writing and reading is fast too, but you don't do that so frequently to care - games excepted). Since you have to get a 120GB disk, remember that you need to keep at least 10% of your disk empty (some say 20%), to have adequate performance.

 

[jime1]

TY Charlie98 & ArisVer : will chose an ssd accordingly

Can I install games on it ?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

FWIW . . . [and I could expect some disparagement about this] . . .

Last year, a friend sold me a refurbed laptop (C2D) with 2GB RAM and a WD Blue 500GB HDD. I wanted to see how I could make it faster. First thing I did: I spent $100 on a 2x4GB SO-DIMM kit.

The same friend also tipped me at that time to a bargain on the MX100 500GB drives. I wanted one for my desktop; bought a spare for the lappie.

Benchmarks showed me how the MX100 couldn't perform beyond the SATA-II 300MB/s limitation. I downloaded Romex Primo-Cache 90-day trial version, and used 3GB of the RAM to cache the MX100. The benchmarks then showed a 1,200 MB/s sequential read speed. I later bought the 3-PC Romex license for $70, and it's now running on two of our desktops as well.

OP is on a budget -- well-understood. On the one hand, folks will argue that the benchmark scores mean less for real-world performance, but the RAM-caching really did make a difference on my old lappie. From another perspective, the Romex caching software costs an additional $30 for 1 PC. But also -- a 90-day trial evaluation period is 3 months, so if you wanted to -- you'd save $10 a month toward the purchase and only decide to buy it at the end of the trial.

OR -- follow the advice of anti-caching skeptics. You'll STILL get a doubling of the maximum HDD speeds you'd see otherwise.

EPILOGUE: The WD Blue 500GB lappie drive has been reallocated to a desktop system fitted with a $40 60GB SSD caching drive. Primo will cache either to RAM or to a caching SSD -- or both. We'd fitted the Ivy Bridge Desktop with a 256GB 840 EVO boot disk, used the lappie drive for additional storage, and it's all lightning-fast.

As to the EVO "problem" -- I haven't noticed anything so far; ran the Magician benchtests on these machines and they're still running as they should. But I understand there will be a firmware patch in addition to the 4.6 version of Magician.

 

[Charlie98]

TY Charlie98 & ArisVer : will chose an ssd accordingly

Can I install games on it ?

You can install whatever you want on it. Games don't necessarily run 'better', but levels load faster. You do need to maintain 10-20% empty space on the SSD for proper performance, however... keep that in mind. Don't go and pack it up with data and programs and expect it to perform properly... that's why so many recommend a minimum of a ~250GB SSD. A ~120GB SSD is fine for the OS and one or two games (depending on the size of the files.)

 

[jime1]

You can install whatever you want on it. Games don't necessarily run 'better', but levels load faster. You do need to maintain 10-20% empty space on the SSD for proper performance, however... keep that in mind. Don't go and pack it up with data and programs and expect it to perform properly... that's why so many recommend a minimum of a ~250GB SSD. A ~120GB SSD is fine for the OS and one or two games (depending on the size of the files.)

Dont worry about the empty space bro ! I can be happy even with a 60 GB primary partition (I don't install a whole lot of stuff )
So I believe 120 GB would be Great for me
TYSM:thumbsup:

 

[Hulk]

Hi Jim,

Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial BX100 are solid drives as well. And they are much better than Kingston's V300 both in performance and reliability

Both goes around 65-70$ recently.

I agree with this and would personally go for the BX100 to avoid any possible future issues with the TLC NAND in the Samsung.

 

[jime1]

I agree with this and would personally go for the BX100 to avoid any possible future issues with the TLC NAND in the Samsung.

So Sam is out of my budget, will buy what ever is good according to you guys and localy available

 

[Berryracer]

So Sam is out of my budget, will buy what ever is good according to you guys and localy available

What's Sam?

 

[jime1]

What's Sam?

Samsung of-course :sneaky:
what else !

 

[jime1]

So I would just buy 1 of these for starters, no matter how fishy

Transcend SSD370 or 340 128GB
or
Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB
or
Crucial M500 or MX or BX 120GB (if available)
or
OCZ Vertex (if available)

 

[LV3]

Crucial BX100

 

[Charlie98]

So I would just buy 1 of these for starters, no matter how fishy

Transcend SSD370 or 340 128GB
or
Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB
or
Crucial M500 or MX or BX 120GB (if available)
or
OCZ Vertex (if available)

Whichever is available and fits your budget, and then which has the better warranty...

Generally speaking, ~120GB SSDs are not as fast as their ~250GB counterparts, but in a SATA2 machine, you will see a nice speed increase nonetheless.

 

[jime1]

that is exactly what I want Char lie !

 

[AlienTech]

There is the PNY Optima 120GB or the OCZ arc 100 which is a little more but a lot better, uses the new 16u chips from Toshiba. amazon US has deals if you watch but you pay shipping and duties (depending on the time). The thing I noticed is, SSD will show up when you read a LOT of small files, hard drives these days are as fast as SSD's in regular use and I did not notice much of a speed difference except when I started using a 10 years old hard drive. You have a recent hard drive that does close to 200MB and in most things you wont notice the difference. I also noticed no matter how fast everything is, other factors matter overall.. Transfer speed from a 200MB hard drive or even an SSD to another USB3 hard drive is sometimes 50MB, sometimes 100MB, depending on time of day. You notice it when you move 500GB of data. Connecting something will slow down the entire system. Like connecting to another USB3 port a older hard drive dropped the speeds to under 50MB for the entire system. The PCE lanes seem to drop to what everyone can agree on for some reason. So its more than just get the top end and you get top end speeds. Everything has to be top end. Better to stick with decent ones so you get decent speeds depending on circumstances. I just got a 5TB Toshiba hard drive and with over 200MB speeds, its close to SSD performance and even random access is around 8MS for such a huge HD. But the SSD will load web pages a lot faster due to hundreds of very small cached files.. A better disk cache than Microsoft's would negate the SSD advantage here. Check out seagate 2TB hard drives. The 2 platter ones also gives close to 200MB speeds.. After using it and going to an SSD I wondered what was the deal with SSD's.. But going from SSD's to older hard drive I did notice it immediately. Since hard drives have as many varities as SSD's speeds vary drastically even among identical model numbers depending on firware used for different hardware changes.. You have to learn about them even for the latest ones. My 3TB one gives read speeds of 50MB and write speeds of 100MB so whats the deal with advanced format sectors screwing up read speeds here?, even though they have same specs as the 2TB model.
I think the 1TB model might use the same tech as the 2TB model, ie a single platter design which would in use be faster than the 2TB models. trying to get one of that particular one would be like ordering a lower end SSD, you are never sure what you would get... Might luck out or not.. So do you feel lucky?

 

[Cerb]

You have a recent hard drive that does close to 200MB and in most things you wont notice the difference. I also noticed no matter how fast everything is, other factors matter overall.. Transfer speed from a 200MB hard drive or even an SSD to another USB3 hard drive is sometimes 50MB, sometimes 100MB, depending on time of day. You notice it when you move 500GB of data.

A lot of that is the OS' caching writes, and telling you it's done when it really isn't (but will be in just a couple seconds), and sending reads directly to the drive, in the meantime. If you don't need more than 100ish IOPS, and aren't latency sensitive, SSD v. HDD won't be huge, and is often overblown by us power users, that have fought for Pyrrhic victories over HDDs for many years, until SSDs. 75ish IOPS, without skyrocketing latency, is about the 5400 RPM threshold (though many will have problems performing even that well), and few 7200 RPM drives can do much more than 120 IOPS, without deep queues and high latencies. But, with many HDDs still being sold that are just damn slow, even compared to HDDs from 5-10 years ago, and SSDs not costing too much, for OS drives...also, a lot of support work for PCs is drive-limited, making SSDs godsends (5 minute AV scans or CHKDSKs, 20 minute 50GB PST repairs...).

The PCE lanes seem to drop to what everyone can agree on for some reason.

Almost every connection with multiple speeds on the same physical connector does this. It's so that you can always plug a new device into and old system or an old device into a new system, and in many cases, run very old software on new hardware. If you watch it real-time, though, you'll see the effects of power saving, as much as anything else.

My 3TB one gives read speeds of 50MB and write speeds of 100MB so whats the deal with advanced format sectors screwing up read speeds here?

If Samsung or Hitachi and 2.5", it could just be strange (a few recent ones were clearly optimized for use as external drives, not OS drives, and have whacky performance). If any 3.5" drive, check partition alignment, if it's an AF drive. AS-SSD is a quick and easy way to do it. Usually it's writes that get slower, but it's all I can think of.

 

[jime1]

I'll buy a 120GB SSD real soon now..
Your latest recommendations will be most welcome, budget : 70$
PS: I have windows 8.1 currently installed on my PC, so will I have to just clone the system partition from my HDD to the new SSD or should I just make a new clean install ?