Solid State of the Union: 5 Top SSDs Reviewed

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

13

Comments

Print

Crunching the Numbers

Talk is cheap—it's the benchmarks that matter.

We poked, prodded, and pummeled these drives with our benchmarks—we even discarded a whole week’s worth of testing when we discovered a mysterious bug with our original test bed—all in our tireless effort to determine which SSD is best for you. In the process, we learned a lot about the state of the SSD market, and even a little bit about ourselves.
    
OK, we didn’t actually learn anything about ourselves. But we did learn that if you have the cash, a solid state drive is a lot more compelling than this time last year, thanks mainly to advances in controller technology. Of the five drives in our roundup, the highest all-around scores went to the two with SandForce SF-1500 controllers, with sustained write speeds averaging around 225MB/s and sustained read speeds of just under 200MB/s. They didn’t have the fastest random reads, but in random writes, only the Intel X-25M is superior. If you want fast random writes (and who doesn’t), you’ll pay a slight premium over Barefoot-controller drives like the Corsair V128 or our current champion Patriot Torqx—the OWC Mercury and OCZ Vertex LE are both around $400 on the street, while the Corsair Nova and the Torqx are closer to $370 for 128GB. And for their part, the Barefoot drives have faster reads.

Beyond the SandForce and Barefoot drives, however, lie dragons. Plextor’s PX-128M1S, which uses Marvell’s 88SS8014-BHP2 controller, is just a bad drive. Whether it’s the firmware or the controller, its read speeds are last-gen and its writes are worse than your average mechanical hard drive—yet it’s barely cheaper than the Corsair drive. You’re better off with a Western Digital VelociRaptor.

Speaking of Western Digital: We can’t currently recommend the SiliconEdge Blue. Whether it’s the fault of the controller or the firmware, the drive stutters during extended writes. That’s unacceptable in 2010.

At $4 per GB, SSDs are still a lot pricier than their mechanical counterparts. But capacity is going up, performance has never been better, and given Windows 7’s TRIM support and easy-to-configure Libraries, an SSD boot drive with enough capacity to hold your favorite games and apps is more feasible than ever. My fellow Maximum PC power users, the state of the union is solid.

Best scores bolded. All drives tested on our hard drive test bench: a stock-clocked Intel i7-920 CPU on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R with 6GB DDR3, running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests performed using Intel south-bridge SATA chipset with Windows 7 default AHCI drivers unless specified.

Next Page: Two budget SSDs vs. One high-performance SSD >>