Solid State of the Union: 5 Top SSDs Reviewed

Posted 06/15/2010 at 12:06pm | by Nathan Edwards

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We take stock of today's SSDs—what they have to offer, how they've progressed, and which should have dominion in your PC

At the end of our November 2008 solid-state-drive roundup, we concluded that those NAND-flash-based drives just weren’t ready for prime time, thanks to astronomically high prices, small capacities, and flaky first-gen controllers.

Flash forward to mid-2010. Not only have newer drive controllers thoroughly washed the bad taste of the first-gen SSDs out of our mouths, but performance has shot through the roof. And the slowdowns that early SSDs experienced when writing to memory blocks where data had been deleted have been vanquished by the TRIM command. Implemented in modern SSDs as well as in Windows 7 and Linux, TRIM’s garbage-collection functionality has helped SSDs overcome one of their remaining hurdles.
 
Of course, there’s still the matter of price. While solid state drives have several advantages over their mechanical hard drive brethren—durability, reliability, and speed among them—they still cost a lot more. A one-terabyte mechanical hard drive costs less than $100, but a 256GB SSD can cost close to $800. Nevertheless, today’s SSDs have significantly dropped in price, and combined with the technological advances, are a much improved value. Is that enough to get your purchasing dollars? We were compelled to find out, Maximum PC–style.

We gathered five newly released SSDs to see how far the field has come since late 2008. We ran each through a gamut of tests: HDTune 4.01 for sustained read and write speeds as well as random-access times and 4KB random reads and writes (historically the Achilles’ Heel of SSDs); PCMark Vantage x64 to simulate performance during common Windows tasks; and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to measure sequential writes by writing an uncompressed AVI to the disk. We’ll tell you how they compare to our current Best of the Best pick, the 128GB Patriot Torqx (the cumulative benchmark results can be found here), and even explore a budget-SSD option. So let’s see how the state of the SSD union fares.

The Reviews

• WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Review

• Plextor PX-128M1S 128GB Review
  

• OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise 100GB Review
  

• OCZ Vertex LE 100GB Review

• Corsair Nova V128 128GB Review
  

Read the First Review >>

Go Straight to The Benchmarks >>