Right now the sweet spot for solid-state drives is a 6Gb/s SATA SSD in a capacity near 256GB (240GB for a SandForce based drive). Why 256? 256 is big enough to store your OS, programs, and several games, and many modern controllers are optimized for that capacity—SandForce SF-2281 controllers, for example, have 16 lanes, and a 240GB drive has 16 NAND modules. Best of all, thanks to this year’s massive price drops, SSD prices are under a dollar per gigabyte: You can get a 256GB Samsung 830 Series, one of our favorite SSDs, for under $230.
So, which SSD offers the best value?
Crucial’s M4 SSD is a favorite of system builders for its relatively good performance and low price. It’s not the fastest 6Gb/s SATA SSD, but it’s plenty fast by any standard, and it’s attractively priced. For $180 at the time of this writing, you can get a drive with sustained reads over 400MB/s, sustained writes over 250MB/s, and good random-read and -write per-formance, as well. For $20 more you get the OCZ Vertex 4, with reads and writes in the 440MB/s range and higher random IOPS, and for $50 more than the M4 you can get a Samsung 830 Series drive, with 500MB/s-plus sequential reads, 400MB/s writes, but lower random IOPS—which is fine, unless you’re running a really active database server.
The specific drive you get will depend on current pricing, and (as is the case with most components) you can get a great drive for a little more than the cost of a very good drive, but right now we think the Crucial M4 is the sweet spot to beat.
| Crucial m4 | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 256GB |
| Controller | Marvell 9174 |
| CrystalDiskMark | |
| Sustained Read (MB/s) | 404.5 |
| Sustained Write (MB/s) | 257.3 |
| 4KB Read, 32QD (MB/s) | 167.9 |
| 4KB Write, 32QD (MB/s) | 235.8 |
| AS SSD | |
| Seq. Read (MB/s) | 407.73 |
| Seq. Write (MB/s) | 249.73 |
| 4KB Read (IOPS) | 5,091 |
| 4KB Write (IOPS) | 13,837 |
| Read Access (ms) | 0.105 |
| Write Access (ms) | 0.278 |
| ATTO | |
| 64KB File Read (MB/s) | 284.9 |
| 64KB File Write (MB/s) | 260.2 |
| IOMETER | |
| 4KB Random Write | 56,087.81 |
| Max Access Time (ms) | 143 |
| Premiere Pro Encode Write (sec) | 429 |
| PCMark Vantage x64 HDD | 61,758 |
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