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SSD Xmas Buyer's Guide: The Best Solid-State Drives of 2012

Posted on December 18, 2012

SSDs are a hot item right now. In our interview with Star Citizen's Chris Roberts, we were told that he sees SSD and multicore utilization coming to the forefront for PC-exclusive games, and it makes sense. Not only will an SSD decrease the load times and increase fluidity of experience for games that stream data (heavily dominated by 4K I/O transactions streamed to memory), they also significantly decrease boot time and make for a more responsive OS.

This Holiday / Xmas SSD Buyer's Guide lists the best SSDs of 2012 (and the hangers-on from 2011) that we've worked with; the drives below have been picked for high-end enthusiast users, everyday / gaming users, and budget users.

ssd-buyers-guide

 

Everything feels faster -- all those split-second waits between your input, pauses that you likely don't even notice, suddenly become evident when matched against an SSD. And it's not just a commodity, at this point; they've become affordable and have a profound impact on efficiency for professional applications. The lower power consumption also makes SSDs a desirable option for portable users, where some can consume less than 3W under load (making for extended battery life).

If you're curious about when an SSD is viable for gaming, check out our Star Citizen article -- we discuss the interactions pretty heavily there. That should give you a good idea if your gaming habits will make use of it.

We've worked with several SSDs over the past month (reviews pending), and from what we've seen, we can comfortably recommend the below options for a single, non-RAID SSD (for gaming and high-end users):

High-End: OCZ Vector

OCZ vector_SSD

  • Brand: OCZ
  • Capacities / Product Links: Vector 128GB, Vector 256GB, Vector 512GB
  • Controller: Custom Barefoot 3 Indilinx Controller
  • 4K Random IOPS (R/W): 100,000 IOPS (R) / 95,000 IOPS (W)
  • Sequential (R/W): 550MB/s (R) / 530MB/s (W)
  • Starting At: $150
 
Most high-end SSDs are so close in speed that a few IOPS or MB/s is totally irrelevant; you won't notice a difference of 10MB/s when operating sequentially at 550MB/s already. It's stability and general reliability that come out as the top factors when comparing the best SSDs (as most of them use the same controllers and similar NAND Flash, anyway). Although OCZ's Agility series has had mixed reliability, its Vertex and Vector drives have really proven themselves to be powerful and stable performers.

The relatively new Vector operates on an in-house-designed OCZ controller, Barefoot 3, which uses an ARM Cortex CPU and Aragon co-processor; this architecture, among many other things, helps to juggle file I/O as the drive nears capacity, which reduces the chance of the drive seizing when under heavy, serious workload.

ocz-block

Alternative: Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (90GB, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB). 

Mid-Range: Samsung 840 SSD 

samsung-ssd

  • Brand: Samsung
  • Capacities / Product Links: 840 SSD 120GB, 840 SSD 250GB, 840 SSD 500GB
  • Controller: Tri-core Samsung Controller
  • 4K Random IOPS (R/W): 96,000 IOPS (R) / 62,000 IOPS (W)
  • Sequential (R/W): 540MB/s (R) / 250MB/s (W)
  • Starting At: $110

 

Samsung's initial information surrounding their 840 and 840 Pro SSDs proved promising, but initial failures with review samples scared us away from recommending them more openly. Luckily, these drive failures were limited to early products (the ones sent to review outlets) and the failures have been confirmed as fixed with new firmware.

The Samsung 840 doesn't quite outperform the Vector for most applications, and very little touches the HyperX in terms of consistent performance (versus bursted/scattered performance), but holds its own quite well in a cost-competitive environment. With its use of TLC NAND Flash instead of the standard MLC, it manages to maintain a lower price-point while still offering competitive performance. Triple-level-cell NAND tends to cost about 30% less than its equivalent MLC counterparts, and while it's true that TLC drives are rated for less overall endurance, the drives will still exceed the usable life of the system (more than 8 years of heavy use, in many cases). You're more likely to suffer from a firmware fault or other manufacturing defect before the NAND's P/E cycles are exhausted.

The 840 SSD has exhibited great 4k IOPS performance, which is excellent for gamers or others performing numerous small file transfers. Its three-core controller means that, much like the Vector, it is able to handle wear-leveling tasks at higher capacities with minimized risk of drive seizures.  

Alternative: Crucial M4 (64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB).

Budget: Kingston SSDNow V300 

kingston-ssdnow-v300

  • Brand: Kingston
  • Capacities / Product Links: V300 60GB, V300 120GB
  • Controller: SandForce Controller
  • 4K Random IOPS (R/W): 85,000 IOPS (R) / 60,000 IOPS (W)
  • Sequential (R/W): 450MB/s (R) / 450MB/s (W)
  • Starting At: $75

 

We just recently received this SSD from Kingston and were impressed with its performance; Kingston drives, along with most other SandForce-controlled drives, tend to exhibit best performance when tested with real-world benchmarking simulators (like PCMark), but look worse on paper when tested with AS-SSD and other incompressible data transactions. Our recent testing (not yet officially published - review pending) benched the SSDNow V300 as having one of the most consistent read rates we've seen in a budget drive.

The thing is that the vast majority of transactions for daily use are read operations—heavy-write users are rare and know who they are—so for daily use, gaming, and lightweight consumer-based tasks, high read rates are always preferential to high write rates. That's where the SSDNow did fairly reasonably in our testing.

Alternative: I think the best alternative to the SSDNow V300 is probably the above 840 SSD. It's close in price and performs excellently; easily worth the price bump if you can afford it.Kingston's HyperX remains one of the more stable drives we've personally benched on our endurance rig to-date.

That should cover most of the price and performance spectrum for single SSDs. If you're a RAID user, we recently ran 2xHyperX SSDs in RAID 0 striped (64K) to see an average (consistent, sustained) 4K IOPS R/W of 7,600 (R) / 16,888 (W) IOPS; QD16 exhibited 67,000 (R) / 113,528 (W) IOPS sustained, which is certainly impressive, especially for heavy-write users. These tests were on our synthetic test suite, which utilizes the new Anvil's Storage Utilities tool, so you'll be able to see the rest of this information in our upcoming RAID analysis. For those curious to see larger numbers, the sequential peak (4MB) was ~1010MB/s, about twice that (as expected, though non-linear) of a single drive.

Just let us know in the comments if you're building a custom RAID array and need assistance. The same goes for anyone who needs advice on SSD selection - please let us know below or on our hardware forums if you need guidance!