What am I looking for when shopping for Solid State Drives?

CaxusCaxus
edited March 2009 in Hardware
I'm starting to get interested in experimenting with a solid state drive but i'm finding it difficult to shop for them because i'm not sure what specs to look for. A lot of ones on newegg are much more expensive than others of the same capacity but i can't seem to figure out what to look for in terms of what makes one faster than the other. There will be one 64gb drive that has a read speed of 150mb/s for $130 while another 64gb drive that has the same read speed will cost $700. I'm confused. Can anyone help explain it to me? :)

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    The price is first dictated by the type of cell and then the capacity. There are two cell types, SLC (single level cell) and MLC (multi-level sell). MLCs store 2 bits of data, whereas SLCs store a single bit. This means that MLC drives can store twice the information per unit of circuit space.

    Before I make my next statement, I want to mention that both SLC and MLC are reliable for more than five years of operation even if you wrote 130GB a day:

    SLC is more reliable than MLC, especially for the enterprise, so there's a great premium on it.

    Additionally, SLC is faster than MLC, though MLC has received more than ample development to make it competitive.

    For more about NAND, I wrote an article that might help.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    Some things to look at are the controller the drive uses. JMicron controllers are inexpensive, but have some known performance issues.

    Both OCZ and G.Skill are selling a drive right now that features dual JMicron controllers to effectively give you RAID 0 in the SSD. The OCZ Apex and G.Skill TITAN both feature this design, and I'm waiting on the OCZ version to go on sale at Newegg as I think it should be the best bang-for-the-buck SSD on the market. The G.Skill is supposedly faster, but its reliability is a concern.

    Olin at Benchmark Reviews has been testing lots of SSDs lately. If you're looking for reviews, check them out. Here's the OCZ Apex they just finished.
  • CaxusCaxus
    edited February 2009
    So after doing more research i'm definitely staying away from those cheap MLC's. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=1 was a very good read.

    The whole purpose behind this is that i'm trying to convince the VP at the game developer i work at to pick up a SSD to try out in one of our machines that converts the pc data to PS3 and X360 data and also does lighting bakes. These converts and lighting bakes take a while and the cpu is barely getting to work at all because the 7200 rpm HD is the bottleneck. One thing he pointed out when i first suggested it is that all of these are 2.5 drives designed for laptops. Are they just meant for laptops or is there an easy way to make them fit in a desktop? The Intel X25-M definitely seems like the best bang for the buck at the moment.
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    There are 2.5"-3.5" bay conversion kind of things where you attach rails or a cradle to the laptop-sized drives and then screw the mounts into the hard drive bay.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    That Anandtech article is 6 months old. Look at the benchmarks here and decide as there are a lot of drives on the market now that compare favorably to the Intel drive. For the price of an 80GB Intel, you can get a 120GB OCZ Apex that competes favorably and beats it in some cases.
  • hrrmphhrrmph
    edited March 2009
    Intel X25-E 32GB $400 at Amazon

    OCZ Vertex 30GB $130 at ZipZoomFly
Sign In or Register to comment.