New to SSDs - opinions on this?

Gudge · 4 Dec 2013 at 00:04

Hi All,

After some consideration I've decided to spoil myself for Christmas and get a SSD for my system; the one I'm looking at is this one:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-026-KS&groupid=701&catid=2104&subcat=1427

It's within the budget (under £90) and has some very positive reviews and is on offer this week - Anyone see any issues with adding this to a Asus P6X58D-E?

Cheers

wazza300 · 4 Dec 2013 at 00:58

should work fine,how much is the Samsung 120gb tho?

jeffa123 · 4 Dec 2013 at 08:02

Excellent choic. The HyperX 128GB is what I run Windows 8.1 on and it boots very fast and keeps its trim very well. The Plus point I found with it was that it came with its own 2.5 to 3.5" caddy. Since purchasing it some six months ago I haven't found it error on anything and it responds well executing Programs and installing data. If you have off drive data files or links to catalogues on other drives it executes the data aquisition very fast. Some people may give you the IOPS and all that but in practice this data means very little. Installing and removing data are the essential uses of a Hard Disk.
To put it simply because it has no moving parts the drive only has to write or delete data from the drive. It uses the same Sandforce processor as most other SSD drives apart from OCZ.

Gudge · 4 Dec 2013 at 12:36

Thanks Both.

@Wazza - I have had a look at a comparable Samsung 120gb drive; it's around £10 more expensive but the main differences to me appears to be the R/W speeds and the Buffering - not sure how much of a difference that is:

Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TD120BW)
Read Speed: 530MB/Sec, Write Speed: 130MB/Sec, Flash: Samsung Toggle NAND, Controller: 3-Core ARM9 Risc MDX 300MHz, Buffer: 256MB LPDDR2
£74

Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G)
Read Speed: 555MB/Sec, Write Speed: 510MB/Sec, Flash: MLC, Controller: SandForce SF-2281, Buffer: 0MB
£63

As a note I feel I should add that I intend to use the SSD for my OS (win7) and a few games that I have on the systems; all my media and mass files will be stored on a standard HDD.

Cheers

wazza300 · 4 Dec 2013 at 13:34

its upto you,most you'll see on both drives are sata2 speeds so 250-260mb read/write

I just trust Samsung more with reliability

Dervious · 4 Dec 2013 at 15:34

The Kingston, for £63, is great value.

The Samsung is a great SSD (and like wazza, I trust Samsung, as I've owned a couple and have fitted more than a few).

Both will provide great performance. I'd say spend the extra on the Samsung if you can afford it, but that's only because I`ve installed a lot of Samsung SSDs, and haven't had any trouble from them. The Kingston should be reliable, but is probably less popular, so evidence of reliability may be harder to find.

Whichever you buy, I doubt you'll regret the purchase.

darael · 4 Dec 2013 at 22:13

I go with the above, more-so after reading reviews. The Samsung 840 Pro isn't that much more expensive and it's a brand that many, many people can positively vouch for.

jeffa123 · 5 Dec 2013 at 00:12

All SSD's are reasonably fast as long as they are SATA 6GB/s, the only criticism is the choir I hear from false figures. On this board I have seen the so called update in action to the buffering on the Samsung which is nothing more than a drag on resources as it basically sets up a Ram disk as a sort of Superfetch, a bit like plugging in a USB stick and asking windows to use it to speed up your system.
Other benchmarking on the Samsungs shows that they handle large data very fast and well but are sluggish on the small blocks of data. Samsungs own figures demonstrate this. The Sandforce 2281 controller is a familiar controller to most and has the least failures since 90% of the market producers use the controller. Crucial, Kingston and Sandisk to name a few. These memory makers have been in the consumer market for years and garuntee their products reasonable lengths of time.
I have a Crucial M500 in my machine running Windows Vista and it has no issues booting and reading, though the O/S does not support Trim.
On the Other Hand I have an OCZ 480GB running Windows 7 where I have had no issues at all. I even Updated the Firmware from within Windows Vista to update the drive. It is still running and it still updates Steam every time I boot it. Where it is 480GB it was an easy choice to use it as a Game and media drive with windows 7 as its basis.
Obviously with Windows 8 you need a reliable outset which will give you reliable backups for future data saving. The problem with any storage device no matter how reliable it is deemed to be you will always get a bad batch. The safeguard to this is to always have a backup plan. When you backup it is your insurance against failure. Before buying any brand or drive check to see if there are any consumer failure rates on the product. The most common reason for failure is impatience. Everyone likes a new toy and likes to push things to the maximum and get the best data rates from something new but invariably People forget that they are not handling a mechanical Hard drive anymore and all it takes to cause an issue on an SSD is some static electricity to brick it. Though most are revived by a simple power cycle others are not.
So, as long as you take simple precautions you should have no problems whichever SSD you choose. Also bare in mind that if you unplug your SSD for a long time you could end up losing more data than you would do if you had a mechanical drive. People are already drawing these comparisons, so they backup to a mechanical drive. Silly I know but it is the catch 22 of computing, damned if you do, damned if you don't, you can't win either way.
Either the Samsung or the Kingston should be fine.

abbotsmike · 5 Dec 2013 at 01:03

I'll have to agree with the comments above about Samsung. I bought an 840 PRO for mine simply because samsung seem to have the best reputation for reliability. The slight differences in performance won't make a real world difference, and mine is blisteringly quick anyway!

Dervious · 5 Dec 2013 at 07:56

jeffa123 said:
All SSD's are reasonably fast as long as they are SATA 6GB/s, the only criticism is the choir I hear from false figures. On this board I have seen the so called update in action to the buffering on the Samsung which is nothing more than a drag on resources as it basically sets up a Ram disk as a sort of Superfetch, a bit like plugging in a USB stick and asking windows to use it to speed up your system.

I think you are referring to "Rapid Mode" on the new Evo drives. That's an optional feature (I find it makes little difference to the real world performance of my system).

Other benchmarking on the Samsungs shows that they handle large data very fast and well but are sluggish on the small blocks of data. Samsungs own figures demonstrate this.

"sluggish" is not something I`ve noticed when using Samsung SSDs, but maybe benchmarks and specifications do prove that Samsung SSDs are "sluggish" with small blocks of data.

Dervious · 5 Dec 2013 at 07:58

darael said:
The Samsung 840 Pro isn't that much more expensive and it's a brand that many, many people can positively vouch for.

I think the Evo is the one to consider, as it is quite a bit cheaper than the Pro.

ChuKKiNinja · 6 Dec 2013 at 11:02

Gudge said:
Hi All,

After some consideration I've decided to spoil myself for Christmas and get a SSD for my system; the one I'm looking at is this one:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-026-KS&groupid=701&catid=2104&subcat=1427

It's within the budget (under £90) and has some very positive reviews and is on offer this week - Anyone see any issues with adding this to a Asus P6X58D-E?

Cheers

I’ve managed to pick up the Kingston HyperX 3K 120gb SSD for £63 and I’m quite pleased with it so far.

Like you I was new to SSDs and didn't know if I should get this or go for one of the Samsung range, but I couldn't really say no at this price. I read a few reviews of the Kingston and it seemed fairly decent, it comes with a 2.5” to 3.5” adaptor, but no SATA cable.

Here’s a screenshot of the speeds I'm getting off my drive at the moment, I think my write speeds are a little low, but I've only had it a day or two so I'm still learning/tweaking. If you want to know anything specific about the drive just let me know

http://i44.tinypic.com/op31wj.jpg

Dave

wazza300 · 6 Dec 2013 at 11:24

you need to bench with atto benchmark for sandforce controlled drives,then you'll see true speeds

Fourstar · 6 Dec 2013 at 12:19

jeffa123 said:
Other benchmarking on the Samsungs shows that they handle large data very fast and well but are sluggish on the small blocks of data. Samsungs own figures demonstrate this. The Sandforce 2281 controller is a familiar controller [snip]

It's a bit misleading saying the Samsungs are sluggish on small writes. Yes the EVO is 20% slower than the PRO when machine gunned with 0.5KB writes but is still double the speed of the SF-2281 equipped Intel 335 SSD and triple the Crucial M500 you mention.

In real world consumer operation I doubt you would notice any difference at all between all three. Is the performance of the PRO worth an extra £50 over the EVO in anything other than benchmarks? Probably not.

ChuKKiNinja · 6 Dec 2013 at 12:19

wazza300 said:
you need to bench with atto benchmark for sandforce controlled drives,then you'll see true speeds

Ah cool, thanks for the tip. I'll give it a shot later.

Dave.

Dervious · 6 Dec 2013 at 12:43

Fourstar said:
It's a bit misleading saying the Samsungs are sluggish on small writes. Yes the EVO is 20% slower than the PRO when machine gunned with 0.5KB writes but is still double the speed of the SF-2281 equipped Intel 335 SSD and triple the Crucial M500 you mention.

In real world consumer operation I doubt you would notice any difference at all between all three. Is the performance of the PRO worth an extra £50 over the EVO in anything other than benchmarks? Probably not.

Most people deciding on which SSD to buy should read this, then decide.

jeffa123 · 7 Dec 2013 at 09:33

Personally I don't consider the data write and read range of the drives all that much different in real terms. You pays your money and get what you get. The major problem I have found is the difference between one motherboards SATA controller over another. I can install an O/S on a small SSD and have it running in 10 minutes average and that goes for Vista as well. The problem I have noticed over the past few months is the amount of failures on Z87 chipset motherboards with most of the OCZ range of drives, likewise some Intel drives have even come a cropper on the same chipset, especially the SATA II SSD's because the controller on the Z87 is SATA 600.
Anything from the Z87 chipset backwards should present no problems and also on the issue most of the issues can be resolved by not installing the Intel Rapid storage drivers. Use the Microsoft ones instead. Some people do it the wise way and install the drives in IDE mode and then from a few tweaks in the registry you can use MSAHCI channels in the current control set to open up the driver space for MS to automatically install its own.
This way you can setup the registry, re-enter the Bios and change it to AHCI and reboot. This can solve many issues on the O/S side. Bare in mind that installing under AHCI in EFI also causes issues when having to change a motherboard. I went from one different chipset to another but kept my previous install of Windows because AHCI was software controlled, now there are more interceptions from the BIOS. Going from an older chipset motherboard can have its advantages and you may never lose a thing in cloning your drive across. Performance is about advantages of transfer not always the speed of access.

Personally I am a control freak. I like to have control over my PC and how it handles information. I dislike being preached to that it easy to install the OS and let that handle everything. We all know what happens there don't we. You get asked the questions like didn't you backup and didn't you take the precautions you usually do before doing things. I am lucky I have had the experience that has taught me the lessons. Instead of buying a single brand of Hard drive I have always purchased many types so I can experience them for myself. A friend of mine Always buys Samsung, from TV's to SSD's. The last Samsung Pro drive he purchased for his MacBook he ended up taking back after one day, he had 3 failures and tried them on a PC Motherboard as well, but he ended up buying another brand in the end. He hasn't given up buying Samsung but he is more wary now that no matter which brand you buy you can always have failures and that Apple are not perfect either.

Dervious · 7 Dec 2013 at 19:39

This is what I do.....

Choose an Intel CPU/Chipset with Sata 3 (typing this on a build based on a H81 MB with a G3220).

Choose the appropriate Evo.

Install Windows 7, and admire the 0 - Homepage time of ~20 seconds.

Forget about it.