The state of solid state hard drives?

[Morningside]

Elderly said:

cornet said:

The crucial M5xx range is the only consumer SSD I know of that includes power loss protection. This means if you lose power to your machine then you shouldn't end up with any corrupt data.

That's good advice for me as I live in a small village that seems to get more than its fair share of power cuts ...... but unfortunately the Crucial M5xx range are no longer available .

Buy a cheap UPS?

[130R]

On a top end machine I would be looking at a PCIe SSD now. They are still a bit pricey though and space is an issue if you have multiple GPUs like I do.

[snuffy]

I've got 3 SSDs in my desktop now. A 250GB for the OS and things like browsers and office. Then another 2 (240GB and 128GB) for games and finally a 1TB HDD for everything else. And then just in case I've a 1TB external HDD running continual backup and continual unlimited cloud backup as well.

[MissChief]

I have a Samsung 830 250GB in my only PC and use it for OS and two or three games and it's been fine for over two years now. Reliability is much improved compared to the previous horror stories of OCZ drives failing with stunning regularity. Stick to a major brand and you'll be fine.

[cornet]

Elderly said:

cornet said:

The crucial M5xx range is the only consumer SSD I know of that includes power loss protection. This means if you lose power to your machine then you shouldn't end up with any corrupt data.

That's good advice for me as I live in a small village that seems to get more than its fair share of power cuts ...... but unfortunately the Crucial M5xx range are no longer available .

Ah they have been replaced - any of the MX range includes it too (MX100, MX200). Note that the BX range doesn't

[james_gt3rs]

I've had a 64GB Samsung SSD in my PC for 5 years, never once had a problem. Cost £150 at the time, worth every penny.

[ZesPak]

All my main drives are SSD's these days.
Never had a single failure, unlike HDD's.

Point of notice:

1. Don't take a 60/64GB one, even if you have a HDD as file drive. Windows and some programms go that way and the price difference with a 120GB one is negligble.
2. For me, 120GB is fine for windows and progs, but in a laptop it needs to be at least 250GB.

[jimothy]

Picked up a Samsung evo 850 1TB off amazon the other day for £270. Great drive, good price. Made my Mac mini so much faster for everything. The only spinning disk left in my place is a external hdd for media, my time capsule and my wife's laptop but she doesn't care about the speed and will probably sell that and steal mine when my new MBP rocks up later this week.

SSDs are a no brainer unless you are on a really tight budget, but are the biggest speed boost you can make.

[Mr2Mike]

jimothy said:

Picked up a Samsung evo 850 1TB off amazon the other day for £270. Great drive, good price.

It's a very good drive, the 850 Evo is also one of the few consumer class drives to come with a 5 year warranty.

In terms of performance/£ an SSD is easily the best value upgrade you can make to a PC or Mac. Unlike a CPU or GPU upgrade, you can instantly see/feel the difference it makes to the system from the moment is starts booting.

[Elderly]

ZesPak said:

Point of notice:

1. Don't take a 60/64GB one, even if you have a HDD as file drive. Windows and some programms go that way and the price difference with a 120GB one is negligble.
2. For me, 120GB is fine for windows and progs, but in a laptop it needs to be at least 250GB.

That's what I'm going to do; a 120GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD and a 1 or 2TB HDD for my photos.

[ZesPak]

Sorry for the thread hijack, just wanted to post this.
I had a Sandisk U100 that was (ironically) in my 2012 Samsung laptop.
So I swapped it out (needed a larger disk) with a new Samsung 850 EVO.

The random read times increased big time, as well as all the write times, don't know if it can have to do with a full disk but I thought that shouldn't affect the speed, at least not that much:



So in short, 1 of two things might have happened:

1) Samsung skimped out on SSD in the laptop, which might explain the questionable choice of not using one of their own drives
2) Tech has moved on ... a lot in three years

I think it's a bit of a combination of both.

Edited by ZesPak on Tuesday 8th September 11:47

[Mr2Mike]

The U100 wasn't a particularly fast SSD when introduced, and as you say things have moved on a lot.