Maximum PC

I have spent around $2000 building a new computer. I would like to put Win 7 on an SSD but I have spent so much money I'm not sure I can fit it into my budget.

Are there any cheap 120gb ones available? I have found some for around $100 but I worry about them being so cheap. Do you really see a difference in boot up speed and such? Is it really worth it?

Thanks in advance!

My default hard drive is 1Tb.

Loading times are hit and miss. My laptop with a 750GB 7200RPM drive loads Windows 7 as fast as my desktop, which has the OS on a 60GB OCZ SSD. Where it really does beat it when it logs in from boot. But since I rarely restart my machines, I don't notice.

The only application I've seen where loading is pretty much "lolwut" is Microsoft Office 2010. On my desktop it always loads up within two seconds. Laptop takes about 5-7

Regarding price, it's going to be really hard for you to go under about $1/GB minus $10ish on the whole drive. I have the same drive Latios XT does and haven't had issues.

yeah i want to know more about prices and what are the good brand names for SSD 's i want to buy one for my desktop it has 500 GB hard and windows 7 ultimate on it and its kind of slow with core i5 processor .. please help me guys to install ssd and transfer windows files to SSD ?

Prices are low because production is up, manufacturers are lowering MSRP's, & retailers need to sell old stock before they break even or lose money on "stock on hand" drives.

I've bought 3 120GB SSD's recently, two Mushkin Chronos & one OCZ Agility 3. When I bought my first Chronos 120GB, it was on sale at $70 off MSRP, I paid $129.99. Currently the same exact drive is on sale at $47 off MSRP at $102.99.

The only reason I got the Agility 3 was that Newegg sent me a coupon code for 15% off any OCZ SSD, so it ended up costing me just $100.77 after shipping, and it's even faster than the Chronos drive.

Mushkin & OCZ are top notch IMO, and if you ever need customer service, Mushkin is quick to answer on their forums, often in less than 12 hours.

I have a Crucial M4 64GB and it's pretty nice. Price is good, and great firmware support. Also the OCZ Agility 3 (budget) or Vertex 3 (performance) are good choices. Samsung 830 Series is awesome, they make the NAND, controller & firmware in-house so it's a quality piece.

Yes, there are some very good low cost units currently. It's another time for change in the SSD market overall, but if you've never had one it shouldn't be thought too much about and just finally get one. The issue with me (because I nitpick) comes to the pricing target and what the small step in money actually gives me in the end.

All 120/128GB:
$96 = Mushkin Chronos. SF-2281 controller, generic Asynch NAND, fairly good firmware thus average performance in all aspects, 3yr warranty.
$120 = Mushkin Chronos Deluxe MX - SF 2281 controller, generic SYNCH NAND, good firmware and is a tad slower than Mushkin's own DX ($200) or Vertex 3, 3 year warranty.
$130 = Intel 330 Maple Crest - SF-2281 controller, cherry picked Synch NAND, Great firmware and surprising performance. The 180GB version competes with Vertex3/Intel 520 in real usage. 5 year warranty.
$144 = Samsung 830 - Samsung's own Tri-core ARM Controller, Samsung ? NAND, and the rest is unknown to me.

See the trend here? It doesn't stop...
$150 = Intel 520 Cherryville - SF-2281 controller, cherry picked Synch NAND, good firmware, performance on par for this price, 5 year warranty.
$150 = OCZ Vertex 4 - Indilinx Everest2 controller (Marvell), Cherry picked Synch NAND, firmware unknown (1.3 has issues, no feed back on 1.4 update), performance should be better than the Intel 520 or Samsung 830...but only down the road as they write this firmware.

From there (minus the Samsung already mentioned), we jump right into $200+ (Mushkin DX, Intel 330 180G, etc...). I'd like to repeat that if you've never had an SSD, the plain Chronos is a great entry point and not to dive too deeply into all the "faster" drives (don't get into the hype). I use the Mushkin Chronos, the Chronos MX, Chronos DX, Intel 330, and Intel 520. I wish I could personally comment on the Samsung 830, but since none of my PC's ever sleep/idle in order to do garbage collection, I need the Sandforce's constant garbage collection and never went there. With the constant garbage collection, it just feels very good from day-to-day. The reads can be "fixed" over time by inducing TRIM by simply emptying the Recycle Bin (And I assume you can do this with the 830). With the Vertex 4, it has the possibility to wow me and go back to them again but it just hasn't happened yet.

So...yeah, $100-150 has a variety within that range. None of them suck at all (compared to any SSD in the past), and going low cost for the SSD wouldn't hurt you one bit. If it were me, I'd go for the basic Chronos. In the iTX build I can restart and be back up and running in 17seconds which happens to be the fastest of them all (more to boot than just the SSD, so take that with a grain of salt), but my desktops take that long just to boot from cold. And in daily usage, it's plenty fast. It's low cost, not really cheap as in low quality. What does $10 or $20 more net you? IMO, not much really upfront. Cherry picked NAND and the 5yr warranty it comes with it, and great Firmware writers I suppose; and at that point you're into $150+ IMO.

I know there's a plethora of them out there and I only summed up my own opinion, so if there's any more specific data you'd like feel free to ask.See the other replies. SSD's can be had off sale for under $1/GB and only go down from there during sales. Not top of the line of course, but not everyone needs the best of the best. $78 (last I paid) for a pretty good 120G SSD sounds good to me.

OCZ also just announced the Agility 4 which also utilizes the Everest 2 controller with Asynch NAND. Should be priced between Agility 3 & Vertex 4 drives. http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-agilit ... l#overview This along with other newer drives from other manufactures coming out soon should drive MSRP's to just under the $1 per GB mark. We might even see sale prices under $0.50 per GB before years end on drives like the Agility 3 & Chronos Deluxe MX.

Yeah, and I hated to speculate on the Agility 4 with myself being weary of the Vertex4. I think we're eye to eye on the futures, but what we have now to purchase is a hair pulling affair. "What does $10 get me the consumer? That's all? Then what's $20 get me?" Right now, $100 gets you a whole lot of lov'n.

I feel I'm good at speculating, the Intel 330 and Agility 4 should be a good battle, and that's what I see to drive the prices down. I can easily eat those words due to seeing OCZ push the Vertex 3 120G out for $100 during sales which says "it's possible"...but it's also a plagued drive IMO (long back story with it, SF, Intel...). SSD are our future, so I still have this feeling that they should be competing harder while spindle drives are having their recovery. Can you make profit off SSD at $.50pG? Yes; yes you can. It's not a 1TB spindle drive for $50, as an example; these are just chips on silicon (long story simplified, of course)
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On the OP's point, I wouldn't build a $500 PC without one let alone a $2000 rig. It should just be instinct to have an SSD in the build budget.

For a budget build, depending the on usage, an SSD is a "nice to have", not a "you have to budget one in." Why? Considering the following questions:

• What is the amount of data you want to have access to at all times? (for a budget build, the question for storage is often SSD XOR HDD)
• How often do you load up programs?
• How often do you reboot the machine (for any reason)?

Concerning #2, if you open a program often enough, Windows will cache it in your RAM, especially on boot up. And if it's like a game or something, do you launch more than once per hour?
Concerning #3, in my case, the "I'm not here" state for my computers is typically sleep mode. I only ever reboot when there's an OS update, a driver update, or when I feel like the computer needs it (which doesn't happen that often between updates). Since Sleep stores system state in RAM and the only hiccup is how fast I can enter my password, it wouldn't matter if you had an SSD or HDD.

How often do you load a program? That's silly...constantly. Windows is a program BTW. Everything you do is a program.

Sleep state is total sleep. The Samsung 830 will not clean itself in sleep...just idle times while it's on. Don't confuse that with suspend to ram. Suspend to Ram is putting keys in your pocket, not starting a vehicle full of other working parts. I only said my computers are always on, and I mean ON...not sleeping; you added that to my words, not me. My HDD's are constantly being used and never ever go to sleep nor are idle. That's why I don't go with Samsung or others doing idle time garbage cleaning, and I'm not the only one here that should feel this way since we're still #6 on the folding@home teams list.

Either way, it's opinion on my usage and I gave basic facts that were very neutral. Should you get a Samsung 830? Not if you suspend to ram, shut down, or keep you computer working 24/7 which is pretty much the majority of people. There's no loss overall for doing on-the-go garbage collection besides benchmarks. We're talking about coming out of sleep vs...what exactly? Not SSD's.

It was a question applied to a particular program. So it could've been worded better. And in fact, I should've worded it for programs that take a while to set up. Launching saying, SpeedCrunch or HWMonitor or Speccy is trivial. Launching PhotoShop? Not so much. Launching your web browser? Probably depends on how many plugins you have loaded for it, but I'm going on a whim and say Windows often caches the browser anyway, unless you never use it.

And I assumed when someone talks about "sleep" to a computer as a whole, it's assumed to be suspend to RAM, considering this is the most often encountered use.

Either way, I was criticizing what you said about budgeting an SSD in a budget build.

Criticism is good, so feel free.

I stand by my statement of ALL programs love instant reads, and that's what SSD's give us. Writes? Still faster than any spindle out there so both sides are negated. It's not an anti-SSD sentiment I feel is it? It's the future and no SSD out there will let us down. Same warranties really too.

The sleep thing is what you said, not me. I only said my computer is always ON...and then allowed ALL to take from that what ya'll want to digest. I'm not being defensive, but am excited that you took the next step I was thinking already. You're thinking with me, not for me...and I get that. So, do you raise the same questions at what SSD one should use here or are we debating semantics? I'll give up on easily on the soft posts at this point. If we dive into SSD's deeper I think this could be a topic of it's own.

At this point, I like soft and generic. It's my opinion and suggestion that the Mushkin Chronos is the drive to have. We'll battle SSD's in an SSD battle thread

I have installed 2 SSD's. I first purchased a Kingston 128GB SSD with a Kit (Kit = Cloning Software with a USB drive case). The I saw a 240 GB OCZ drive on sale. which I used to clone the Kingston which had about 100 GB. I have a program installed caleed bootimes and I average between 23 and 25 second to boot or restart compared to arouns a minute with my 5400 RPM 750 GB HD.

That's why I would take all boot times with a grain of salt, SSD or not. I think the little Asus H61 iTX has limited features, a lot of fluff I don't use disabled, and a really clean BIOS to load before Windows even gets into the picture to BOOT from. POST can indeed add lot to the entire BOOT time and the drive itself doesn't take effect until after all that. The ATX MSI P67 I'm using takes longer to get to the windows splash than the iTX build does to do a full reboot...and both are SSD. The iTX is very close to booting rather than suspend/sleep, so I can't say the SSD did that at all.

MS are even saying they've made it too fast in Win8 and added features in the BOOT tools menu, which I don't understand.