In the wake of our mSATA round-up, we updated our SSD hierarchy chart and tweaked our recommendations. Prices have also shifted in this post-holiday, post-CES environment. The special deals we saw back before Christmas are gone, but bargains still exist.
Detailed solid-state drive specifications and reviews are great—that is, if you have the time to do the research. However, at the end of the day, what an enthusiast needs is the best SSD within a certain budget.
So, if you don’t have the time to read the benchmarks, or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right drive, then fear not. We at Tom’s Hardware have come to your aid with a simple list of the best SSD offered for the money.
January Updates
Although we're focusing a little less on the performance difference between high-end SSDs these days, we were admittedly impressed by OCZ's Vector and Samsung's 840 Pro in the past few months. Keep a mind to context, though. Samsung's 830 was somewhere around 30% faster than the company's 470. Meanwhile, the new 840 Pro is less than 10% faster than the 830 in our trace-based storage benchmark. Clearly, we're hitting the limits of SATA 6Gb/s.

Price continues to be an issue for folks trying to work an SSD into budget-oriented builds. We're in the process of putting our next System Builder Marathon together. The theme this quarter is going to be "diminishing returns." Rather than using the familiar price points, we're going to keep all three configurations close together to get a better sense of how just a small budget increase affects value. Interestingly enough, a respectably-sized SSD is really hard to fit in there without compromising major gaming alacrity or productivity-based performance.
Quite simply, cost per gigabyte of solid-state storage is still such that we think 120/128 GB drives are a sweet spot right now. That's great for operating system and application storage, but user data necessitates that you add a conventional disk, too. Smaller feature geometry helps by increasing density, though that comes at the cost of endurance. Can SSD vendors continue increasing performance, shrinking lithography, and maintaining endurance suitable for client applications? Not indefinitely, research suggests.
More immediate-term, Samsung is using triple-level cell in its 840 (non-Pro) drive to help bring down cost, albeit at lower performance and with less endurance. Although read speeds from the 840 come close to the flagship 840 Pro, writes are much less impressive. More important, the 840 doesn't cost any less than the drives out there equipped with MLC NAND, which was supposed to be the whole point. If Samsung were to drop its prices by 10%, we think the 840 would be a better buy.
Some Notes About Our Recommendations
A few simple guidelines to keep in mind when reading this list:
- If you don't need to copy gigabytes of data quickly or load games in the blink of an eye, then there's nothing wrong with sticking with a mechanical hard drive. This list is intended for people who want the performance/responsiveness that SSDs offer, and operate on a specific budget. Now that Intel's Z68 Express chipset is available, the idea of SSD-based caching could come into play for more entry-level enthusiasts, too.
- There are several criteria we use to rank SSDs. We try to evenly weigh performance and capacity at each price point and recommend what we believe to the best drive based on our own experiences, along with information garnered from other sites. Some people may only be concerned with performance, but that ignores the ever-present capacity issue that mobile users face ever-presently. Even on the desktop, other variables have to be considered.
- Prices and availability change on a daily basis. Our picks will be valid the month of publication, but we can't extend our choices very far beyond that time frame. SSD pricing is especially competitive, and a £10 difference can be the reason why one SSD makes the list, while another does not. As you shop, use our list as a guide, but always double-check for yourself.
- The list is based on some of the best U.S. prices from online retailers. In other countries or at retail stores, your mileage will most certainly vary.
- These are new SSD prices. No used or open-box offers are in the list; they might represent a good deal, but it’s outside the scope of what we’re trying to do.
But you simply cannot do that with the Samsung 840 (non Pro) TLC based drive.
Running a 12GB per day data workload (not so hard to do with big Steam updates + HD movies etc these days ) that drives lifespan would be approx 3.5 years and it "wisely" only comes with a 3 Year warranty.
Is a great drive for light users.
But heavier users would be better off going for an MLC drive with approx double that lifespan with that data usage.
I've seen the excellent Samsung 840 Pro 256GB drive for £177.59 inc VAT during a recent aria sale for example. These things are only getting cheaper