I'm thinking of upgrading to a SSD. I am considering 3 non-Sandforce drives. The Plextor M5Pro, Samsung 830, or the OCZ Vertex 4. Does anyone have any experience with these drives or manufacturers? How do the manufacturers utilities for these drives compare? Any experience with tech support from these companies? If anyone has any insight as to their choice of drive I would be happy to hear. I will be installing a fresh copy of Widows 8.
Samsung 840 pro is on its way and looks like it will be very good, possibly the best but there needs to be more testing before anyone makes that claim. I know quite a few people using the 830s and they are having no issues at all. The vertex 4 does great in most testing but I do not know anyone that is currently using one. I have Force GS SSDs in quite a few systems and have had absolutely no problems at all with them, great drives. Plextor M5Pro, I do not know anything about this one.
When considering Samsung, I'd recommend the 830 or the 840 Pro. The basic 840 250GB (using tlc memory) shows to be 20-30% slower than a 840Pro 256 GB in trace-benchmarks like Boot StorageMark. I also know the Vertex 4 to be a great SSD and has 5yr guarantee like 840Pro. 830 and 840 have 3 yrs guarantee.
I'm not famliar with Plextor M5Pro, but about a year ago when I was shopping for my SSD both Samsung 830 and OCZ Vertex 4 came highly recommended. I chose Samsung 830 because my laptop's brand is Samsung so I figured it would have less chance of incompatibility issues. I've been happy with the drive.
Just something I posted earlier to give you a hindsight on SSD's http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/i...y-to-sandforce
Thanks for the replies. The Samsung appealed to me because it is comprised of all in-house parts. The Vertex appealed because of the reasonable price, 5 yr warrantee, and great benchmarks (even the 128GB version). The M5Pro because of the strict quality control and good performance. Right now the Samsung desktop kit (128GB) is on sale for $109, the Plextor $139, Vertex 4 $99. Also the Intel 520 is on sale for $119. The Vertex 4 is the lowest priced at the moment and OCZ's website is a wealth of information. I have a few days before the others go off sale so I'll wait and see if others have any comments or see if anything else goes on sale.
I just bought the Samsung 830 Series MZ-7PC128B/WW 128GB for $69.99 otd last night. It's OOS now or I'd post the link. I got it from tigerdirect. Might want to check in case it comes back in stock. My 1st SSD. Should be fun learning about them as I install it. Looking forward to 20 second boot times.
The sandforce drives just seemed to be having a lot of blue-screen issues. I just want to have a solid, reliable, drive. Any SSD would be a big improvement. I would consider an Intel sandforce drive as they seem to have their firmware ironed out. That $69 Samsung was a great deal. Tigerdirect has good Samsung prices even at their everyday price. The rest of the drives I looked at seemed to be higher than Newegg though. I installed all the different drives utilities while under Timefreeze just to get familiar with them. The Samsung utilities looked the most polished and comprehensive. Intel's weren't bad either. OCZ's seemed a little lacking but I couldn't tell as I did not have a SSD in my system. I'll wait a couple more days till I decide.
This is like an A vs B as I use Mushkin Enhanced SSD's without issues for almost a year and a half now but they are SandForce driven but made in the USA. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...CH&N=100011692&isNodeId=1&Description=mushkin http://www.mushkin.com/About-Us.aspx TH
I have OCZ Agility 3 120GB and lately (I have had it for 9 months) it has starting to lock up, atleast I think it is the OCZ SSD disk anyway. For a couple of weeks I have had seemingly random lockups of my computer. It often starts by keyboard stops working and when I try to open or close a program nothing happens. I have to do a cold reboot. When rebooted it hangs on the windows 8 boot screen, it finds all the hardware but they are locked up, keyboard is frozen. It always lockes up in the windows boot process or when logged in to windows, so I figure there maybe is som problems with windows 8 and the SSD? I have to go to BIOS a number of times to remove the SSD and put it back again as boot disk, then it wont lock in the boot process. But sooner or later it locked up in windows at least once a day. I have now cloned my windows partition to another smaller SSD and have not encountered any problems yet after two days. With the OCZ SSD I had at least one lockup every day the last two weeks. I have also upgraded the firmware on OCZ (but for now I dont run Windows from that SSD.) Well thats my experience of OCZ SSD. My other SSD is Cruical 64GB and I have always had Linux Mint on that without any problems. But as mentioned I now have cloned Windows to that drive to see what happens.
I just got my Windows 8 disk and imaged it to a USB drive for installation. Can't wait to see a USB to SSD install. Unless there is another special on the 830 tomorrow I'll probably go for the Vertex 4 even though it went up $5.
I thought I'd update this thread. I decided to go with the Corsair Neutron. After missing many sales and watching SSD prices climb I went with the Corsair. I've had good luck with their memory and power supplies. The USB to SSD Windows 8 install only took about 10 minutes. The only snag I found was the ASMedia 106x SATAIII drivers for Windows 8 crash the system. So I'm running with the Win8 native ASMedia drivers for now. In case anyone is installing Windows 8 on an SSD you may want to check out this article. -http://www.tweakhound.com/2012/11/14/windows-8-ssd-settings-etc/
Good link! I have an old Intel X-25 M. I've done a clean install onto it using the MS W8 download and have installed the Intel Toolbox. If I'm using the Toolbox regularly, should I disable 8's native 'optimisation'? I assume using both might be detrimental to the drive? Cheers philby
That's a good question. I don't have any experience with the Intel Toolbox but I think a trim command whether by Win8 or Intel would be the same. I think I would let Win8 do it's thing. On Win7 I would use the toolbox since there are some services that should be disabled. I don't have any experience here to draw from so maybe someone else will chime in.
Damn, i want to pull the trigger for an SSD also but . . . MONEY! I already spent like $150 to update my PC a bit. (Planning to keep it for a couple years) I was considering an SSD but ended up getting a Western Digital Velociraptor on eBay for dirt cheap. (Space, durability, Price)
Oh you reminded me that one of the main reasons (Other than price/space ratio) was that my motherboard is only SATA II, which would still bring big improvements but not as much as it could have been wit ha SATA III. Was that test done in a SATA II motherboard?
Noob, On a practical basis you won't notice much difference between II and III. SATA II is fine for SSDs. It's a big speed jump from a HD.
i installed a ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128 GB last week and everything has been working smooth so far. i was concerned installing a SSD on a old SATA 2 mobo but everything seems fine. using IDE mode here as my mobo does not support AHCI. (i think it's IDE, as i see no options at all in the BIOS for this) it made a huge difference in the how responsive and how 'snappy' Windows 8 feel. boot time when from about 1 minute to about 15-20 seconds. restoring a system image takes 1 minute instead of 4 +. programs launch much faster. but on Linux Mint Cinnamon and KDE it feels a tad faster nut nowhere near what i am experiencing in Win 8.
