Conclusion
The good news is that none of the 12 SSDs we reviewed left a bad impression. Only one product, the Cavalry Pelican SSD, failed to reach the performance level we’d expect from modern drives (200+ MB/s reads for desktop/mobile type SSDs). Every other drive delivered more than 200 MB/s maximum read throughput and write throughput superior to many 2.5” hard drives. At the same time, power consumption tops out at 2.3W and typically stays well below that. For the first time, all SSDs truly deliver on what the marketing departments have been promising all along: much increased storage performance at low power consumption. If you want SSD, we’re happy to say that your purchase will finally be worth it.
However, there still are differences between drives, despite many vendors building with the same blocks (namely Indilinx controllers). OCZ went extreme with the Vertex Turbo and overclocked the cache memory in an effort to increase throughput. The company succeeded, but at the expense of I/O performance. Asax, Crucial, and Super Talent were also very strong on throughput. Corsair, Intel, and OCZ’s Summit proved extremely efficient at idle and moderate loads, making them great for ultra-mobile notbooks.
Even six months ago, it was easy to identify winners and brand the losers. But most of these SSDs will do great in your PC or notebook. Intel’s new 34nm X25-M isn’t very different from preceding drives. It still offers the same performance and hence falls behind in terms of writes, but the X25-M still stomps the yard on delivering high performance efficiency in I/Os, despite relatively high I/O power consumption.
We recommend you examine the individual benchmark results and find the perfect drive for your application. To help, we created two performance indices: one for desktop users putting more emphasis on throughput and application benchmarks, and a second for enterprise users looking for a decent drive in entry-level servers or workstations. Keep in mind that most of these drives weren’t designed for servers, so the second index doesn’t reflect support, reliability, compatibility, and so on.
Performance Summaries: Desktop
Performance Summaries: Enterprise
Latest Internal Storage News
- 09/02 – Laser Heat Used to Make HDD Write Transfers Faster
- 07/02 – Intel Introduces New 520 Series Line of SSDs
- 02/02 – Seagate Believes HDD Supply Disruption to Continue in 2012
- 01/02 – Other World Computing (OWC) Reveals Two New SSDs
- 28/01 – Cleversafe Announces 10 Exabyte Storage System Configuration
Latest Internal Storage reviews
- 09/02 – Momentus XT 750 GB Review: A Second-Gen Hybrid Hard Drive
- 06/02 – Intel SSD 520 Review: Taking Back The High-End With SandForce
- 01/02 – Upgrade Advice: Does Your Fast SSD Really Need SATA 6Gb/s?
- 26/01 – Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay
- 24/01 – Best SSDs For The Money: January 2012
shit review, the G1 is alot worse then the G2 over time/use and intel won't be giving the G1 the Trim command
Would have been helpful to have a hard drive in there for comparison just to reflect just how far SSDs improve performance.
Where are the comparisons at empty verses used? This is a key differentiator at the moment and you seem to have missed the point completely. Its not how well a drive performs out of the box its how far it degrades once time has taken its toll.
There is a lot missing from this article. TBH, I wouldn't use this as a basis for making a decision on what SSD to buy.
One of your competitors has a superb article on SSD that they published recently, that delves into new vs used performance, and a good explanation of TRIM, and why it's important.
IMO, this article is not up to the usual THG high standard.
Why is the Vertex doing so extremely bad in the write-test?? Just 74MB/s write?? Is that a typo and is it suposed to be 174MB/s?
Fail, Fail, Fail.
Once again THG resorts to lots of silly benchmarks but misses the point... I wouldn't pick a drive based on this roundup!
Where, or where are the degradation of write performance tests... Thinking where all the Flash blocks are used and write cycles become Write-Read-Write cycles. (heading off to AnandTech again...)
Where is the Patriot Torqx M28 SSD (128Mb cache & 10 year warranty) in this "roundup"??
If you want a fast boot drive for "desktop usage" you'll surely want more I/O performance emphasise.
Bob
... Thinking where all the Flash blocks are used and write cycles become Write-Read-Write cycles. ...
I meant Read-Modify-Write of course!!
It's like you guys haven't read Anand's articles on SSDs or intentionally ignoring it. SSDs with JMicron controllers are automatically crippled SSDs. At least until JMicron cleans up their shoddy work, but then they'd have to fight against a bad reputation.