Any enthusiast or power user simply has to have an SSD as their boot drive. Yes they are expensive, so thats why you need to size one accordingly. Most people can live with a 128GB drive reasonably well.
"I just want it to work" is a fair concern. My advice would be a Samsung 830. Top notch reliability, toolbox application, free copy of Norton Ghost 15 and current generation speed. The Intel 510 is far too expensive for what it is and the 830 would be a lot faster. The Intel 520 is there but thats a little more of a risk IMO. The 830 has been out a good 4 months and even with no reports of bugs in the wild Samsung still fixed a few things with it.
I do disagree with exdeath about HDDs. I have a 1TB HDD for all my music, videos, p0rn, and backup images for when I fix peoples PCs for them. There's certainly no way I would store >200GB of Acronis or Ghost images on an SSD when I access them once a year.
I have an Intel 310 160GB SSD and think that the hype behind them is a bit overblown.
Maybe I am misremembering things but whenever I watch those comparison videos I swear to God that my HDD never took that long to load Windows or World of Warcraft.
Same, I have a 4 year old computer with HDD only, and it loads stuff faster than those HDD examples.
If you compare the two on bench at the same capacity and both on 6Gbps then the 830 wins every single test apart from power consumption and 2KB or less sequential read. Everything else the 830 wins, and some by a huge margin. The 830 also spanks the 510 if you play top-trumps with the data sheets. It's also much cheaper.I thought that you knew what you were talking about until I read that sentence. The 830 is a "lot faster" than the 510? In artificial tests it looks pretty good, but according to Anandtech's Samsung 830 review, in the real world scenarios encompassed by the Anandtech storage bench both light and heavy workloads the intel 510 series is actually faster. Honestly looking at them side by side they're nearly the same speed, and both have trouble keeping up with the 520 series of course. And the 510 series IS far too expensive, so at least you were half right.
Been lots of progress. I used to load programs from a cassette player ~30 years ago. Took 30 minutes to load a < 48 KB program.
If you compare the two on bench at the same capacity and both on 6Gbps then the 830 wins every single test apart from power consumption and 2KB or less sequential read. Everything else the 830 wins, and some by a huge margin. The 830 also spanks the 510 if you play top-trumps with the data sheets. It's also much cheaper.
Open up the AT Bench and compare the 510 120GB 6Gbps vs 830 128GB 6Gbps. There are 12 tests which cover AT Bench 2011 heavy and light. The 830 wins every single one by a clear margin. However if you change the 830 to the 512GB version, the gap becomes a lot closer, which is what is reflected in the review figures. Why the 512GB version is coming out slower than the 128GB version I haven't a clue. So going off the bench comparison, my original comment is correct. Whether AT has some figures wrong somewhere, seems possible now.I didn't say that the theoreticals don't seem to favor samsung, all I said was that in the real world situations presented by Anandtech Storage Bench, the 510 series is faster in both light and heavy usage. And the samsung drive is actually larger, so I can't imagine that the 510 series somehow has an unfair advantage in this test. Also, I already mentioned that the 510 series is too expensive, I'm not sure why you brought it up again.
Open up the AT Bench and compare the 510 120GB 6Gbps vs 830 128GB 6Gbps. There are 12 tests which cover AT Bench 2011 heavy and light. The 830 wins every single one by a clear margin. However if you change the 830 to the 512GB version, the gap becomes a lot closer, which is what is reflected in the review figures. Why the 512GB version is coming out slower than the 128GB version I haven't a clue. So going off the bench comparison, my original comment is correct. Whether AT has some figures wrong somewhere, seems possible now.
Thanks for that explanation exdeath, makes sense.
So the end result is up to 512GB, the 830 is faster than the 510 across all but 2KB or less seq read, which does make it an overall faster drive. AT have used the 512GB version in their reviews which is actually slower, and if you run bench on that vs the 240GB 510, the Intel wins.