Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up
Table of contents
- 1. Tom’s Hardware Mainstream SSD Shootout
- 2. The SSD Landscape
- 3. Asax Leopard Hunt II (TS25M64, 128 GB)
- 4. Asax Server One 120 (200 GB)
- 5. Crucial RealSSD C300 (64 GB)
- 6. G.Skill Phoenix FM25S2S (100 GB)
- 7. G.Skill Phoenix Pro (120 GB)
- 8. Intel X25-V (40 GB)
- 9. OCZ Vertex 2 (VTX100G, 100 GB)
- 10. OCZ Vertex 2 (E series, VTX2E120G, 120 GB)
- 11. OWC Mercury Extreme SSD (100 GB)
- 12. RunCore Kylin II SSD (100 GB)
- 13. Test Setup
- 14. Benchmark Results: Access Time
- 15. Benchmark Results: I/O Performance
- 16. Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput
- 17. Benchmark Results: 4K Random Reads/Writes And Interface Bandwidth
- 18. Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage
- 19. Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
- 20. Benchmark Results: Power Efficiency
- 21. Performance Indexes
- 22. Conclusion
- 23. Comparison Table
Which SSD should you buy today? Seventeen flash-based drives battle across a benchmark suite that include throughput, I/O performance, consistency, power consumption, efficiency, and the best overall bang for the buck. The time is right to upgrade.
Ten new products and a total of 17 drives make this the most comprehensive SSD roundup in Tom’s Hardware history. We provide a check list of what you need to know for your SSD purchase and look at all the test candidates before making recommendations. Despite the fact that Intel's recently-leaked roadmap indicates 25 nm MLC flash drives as large as 600 GB arriving in Q4, now is still as good a time as any for an SSD upgrade, given the strong offerings currently available.
Pros and Cons
An SSD is a storage product that serves the function of a hard drive, but it doesn't use magnetized rotating platters to store data. Instead, SSDs utilize NAND flash memory, which introduces a plethora of advantages, together with a few potential caveats.
SSDs have no moving parts. Dropping an SSD shouldn't harm any stored data as long as the solder points survive the impact and the drive doesn’t suffer other physical damage. Additionally, SSDs are less susceptible to extreme temperatures, and recent product generations are much lower on power consumption than conventional hard drives. However, performance is still the top reason to pick an SSD device, and we’re glad to say that all SSDs in this review are considerably faster than hard drives.
Due to the nature of flash memory, it's not possible to erase individual bits. Flash cannot write in the same way as DRAM. Instead, only larger blocks are erased and programmed, which takes much more time than read operations. Also, flash memory cells have a limited number of write cycles, and this requires intelligent wear-leveling algorithms in the controller to prevent premature failure. Modern flash SSD products take advantage of several tweaks in order to avoid write performance bottlenecks and the performance-depleting effect known as write amplification, which causes the drive to write more bits than the data requires. All current SSDs use intelligent controllers that access multiple flash memory channels and work with a cache buffer to optimize writes. If you pick one of the latest drives and use a modern operating system, such as Windows 7, you’ll enjoy all the SSD benefits with no risks of running into real issues.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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Latest Internal Storage News
- 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
- 26/01 – The 15 Winners of the "Explain a Samsung SSD" Contest
- 25/01 – Nvidia & AMD Say HDD Shortage is Impacting GPU Sales
Latest Internal Storage reviews
- 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
- 13/01 – Storage Performance In Entertainment And Content Creation
- 05/01 – 60/64 GB SSD Shootout: Crucial, Samsung, And SandForce
Where are you getting your prices for the Mercury Extreme? On OWC's site, they list the 120GB Extreme Pro for $319, and the 100gb Extreme Pro RE (RAID ready, with more overprovisioning) for $369. Not the 399 you mention. The most fair comparison is the 120GB Extreme Pro, which I just purchased for my laptop, and its price is just about in line with the other Sandforce drives out there. plus, you get OWC's awesome warrantee, which to me is worth the extra 20 or so dollars.
>_> i just ordered a crucial c300 64gb lol
It had to be done, i've been waiting ages to get one and tbh i got it for £108 which is nothing compared to a mobo/processor upgrade but will deliver so much more performance.
Its only small but i have 2TB already for storage, i just need something quick for windows
On the second page you write the following:
"You can recognize these both by the performance discrepancy between reads and whites and by the exterior"
Shouldn't that have been "write" rather than "white"? Just a small nitpick, thanks for doing this roundup!
Did I miss something? Why do we have the Kingston drive in the final tables but not in any of the tests?
Strange, I keep getting emails saying there's a new post but can't see any new post here. See below:
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It was a spammer that got nuked.
I admit I skipped straight to price/performance charts. The text mentions SandForce SSDs, but this name is not on the graphs anywhere, which is a bit troubling. Yes, my lazy eyes will search the article again for the correct relation between fantasy name and manufacturer. Another nitpick.
...But what the hell, the Crucial drives show up on the top 1/4 of all the graphs that matter. I smell a Christmas gift for myself coming up...
Or maybe it is VERY late, and I am VERY sleepy. Otherwise the Crucial's C300 FTW.
GoneMad: they are referring to the Sandforce controller the different SSD's use
which is better then the other controlles some SSD's use so check out each drive which controller they use and you figure it out