Best value SSD?

Author
Discussion

21TonyK

Original Poster:

11,527 posts

209 months

Wednesday 7th December 2016
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Any particular ones to look at or avoid?

Planning to upgrade the HDD on daughters laptop over Xmas and remembered seeing some damning reviews of Kingston?

Looking at 500GB or there abouts.

anonymous-user

54 months

Wednesday 7th December 2016
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Dunno if its best value but Samsung EVO'S

GreigM

6,728 posts

249 months

Wednesday 7th December 2016
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Used a lot of Crucial drives here - never had a single failure.

wiggy001

6,545 posts

271 months

Wednesday 7th December 2016
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I've just upgraded my laptop to a Crucial MX300 which I got for £86 for 525GB on Amazon thanks to an eagle-eyed PHer. Seem to be £111 now.

Melman Giraffe

6,759 posts

218 months

Wednesday 7th December 2016
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What capacity?
SSD or MSATA?


21TonyK

Original Poster:

11,527 posts

209 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
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Am I right in thinking (apart from the form factor) mSATA has a higher transfer/R?W rate than a Samsung 7mm SSD?

anonymous-user

54 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
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I went with crucial for our old desktop. Absolutely transformed it.

Was €120 or something for 512gb. They come with cloning software, as well as they have a tool which you just put the model number of your computer in, and it tells you which disk works.

Ours worked straight out of the box, first time. Boot time has gone from +2 mins and never ending disk reading noise, to -15second boot and instant everything.

Would highly recommend.

Bikerjon

2,202 posts

161 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
quotequote all
Many years have passed since the horror stories of the early SSD's. There's loads of good ones now. I buy Crucial, Samsung, Sandisk, Kingston and Toshiba and all seem fine. Some are slightly faster than others on read/write speeds, but for real world general use anything is better than a traditional hard drive. Just remember to backup though as data recovery from an SSD is no picnic!

ZesPak

24,429 posts

196 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
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Had good experiences with a lot of brands. In terms of bang for buck, Samsung seems to be pretty good imho.
In the end, it's a near tenfold faster than any HDD, the differences in speed between ssd in the same price class are relatively insignificant.

Matt100HP

250 posts

116 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
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I bought a couple of 525GB Crucial MX300s last week for about 80 quid each and they're performing absolutely fine so far.

As long as you're buying from a reputable brand, I'm not sure it really matters which specific SSD you choose. I've bought drives from Crucial, SanDisk and Integral, they have all been indistinguishable in terms of reliability (they have all always worked flawlessly) and real world performance. Judging by the popularity of Samsung's SSDs I would assume they're also fine, though I've never bought one as they always seem to be a bit more expensive than other options.

As for which is the best value SSD, that simply depends on what is on offer when you happen to be buying. The products themselves from the major players all seem to be so similar at any given capacity that price is the only significant differentiating factor.


Smiler.

11,752 posts

230 months

Thursday 8th December 2016
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techiedave said:
Dunno if its best value but Samsung EVO'S
I've been using these for 6 years & they've been flawless.

Monty Python

4,812 posts

197 months

Friday 9th December 2016
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How old is the laptop? If it's using the old ATA-150 interface then you won't see much benefit over a SSHD. I just put a Crucial MX300 in my old laptop and while there was an improvement it was nowhere near the improvement I got when I did the same upgrade to my desktop over SATA3.

droopsnoot

11,934 posts

242 months

Friday 9th December 2016
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I must admit I'm disappointed that SSD prices are still as high as they are, relative to HDDs. In my head at least, it seems that the production cost of a physical HDD (which needs a clean room, high-speed spinning platters, head alignment and all sorts of very intricate stuff) should mean that an SSD would be much less costly to manufacture, and therefore to sell. I guess I'm just glossing over how long it took for HDD prices to get to where they are, and maybe an amount of pricing in accordance with performance rather than production cost.

chris285

811 posts

132 months

Friday 9th December 2016
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Samsung EVO 850, probably best all round consumer drive about

21TonyK

Original Poster:

11,527 posts

209 months

Friday 9th December 2016
quotequote all
Monty Python said:
How old is the laptop? If it's using the old ATA-150 interface then you won't see much benefit over a SSHD. I just put a Crucial MX300 in my old laptop and while there was an improvement it was nowhere near the improvement I got when I did the same upgrade to my desktop over SATA3.
3/4 years, Asus S200E

Matt100HP

250 posts

116 months

Friday 9th December 2016
quotequote all
droopsnoot said:
I must admit I'm disappointed that SSD prices are still as high as they are, relative to HDDs. In my head at least, it seems that the production cost of a physical HDD (which needs a clean room, high-speed spinning platters, head alignment and all sorts of very intricate stuff) should mean that an SSD would be much less costly to manufacture, and therefore to sell. I guess I'm just glossing over how long it took for HDD prices to get to where they are, and maybe an amount of pricing in accordance with performance rather than production cost.
SSD prices have actually gone up recently, something to do with the price of NAND.

I was hoping, admittedly somewhat optimistically, for £100/TB by Black Friday 2016...that didn't happen.

DuncsGTi

1,152 posts

179 months

Friday 9th December 2016
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Smiler. said:
techiedave said:
Dunno if its best value but Samsung EVO'S
I've been using these for 6 years & they've been flawless.
Completely agree about Samsungs, not had one die on me yet.

Im currently running a 500gb 850 pro for storage and a pair of 500Gb NVMe 950 pro in raid0 for os, games and programs

Monty Python

4,812 posts

197 months

Saturday 10th December 2016
quotequote all
21TonyK said:
3/4 years, Asus S200E
In that case it's SATA3 so you should get a decent improvement (especially given the HD fitted as standard is a slow 5400rpm one). If you can't stretch to an SSD then the SSHD is an option (1TB for around £80).

21TonyK

Original Poster:

11,527 posts

209 months

Saturday 10th December 2016
quotequote all
Monty Python said:
21TonyK said:
3/4 years, Asus S200E
In that case it's SATA3 so you should get a decent improvement (especially given the HD fitted as standard is a slow 5400rpm one). If you can't stretch to an SSD then the SSHD is an option (1TB for around £80).
Thanks for that. Looks like it will be a Crucial or Samsung, guess whatever is on Prime and cheapest at the time.

Last Q. Bearing in mind there is no CD/DVD on the machine I'm guessing I need a USB cable for the drive and some cloning software. Any recommendations on SW, just use a freebie off the web? I suspect I'll have to create a bootable memory stick with the SW on?

Cheers all

Don

28,377 posts

284 months

Saturday 10th December 2016
quotequote all
bulldong said:
I went with crucial for our old desktop. Absolutely transformed it.

Was €120 or something for 512gb. They come with cloning software, as well as they have a tool which you just put the model number of your computer in, and it tells you which disk works.

Ours worked straight out of the box, first time. Boot time has gone from +2 mins and never ending disk reading noise, to -15second boot and instant everything.

Would highly recommend.
I put a Samsung 1TB SSD into my Mac Mini. The transformation was equally amazing. +1 minute boot down to a few seconds. Word/Excel were taking forever to load. Now just a few seconds.

You used to fit more RAM to speed things up. These days its swapping out the HDD for an SSD that's the trick. Even a three or four year old computer can perform like a new one again with an SSD it seems.