SSD 60GB - temptations

[rafal_iB_PL]

Hi,

I've seen a few SSDs for really good prices, I'd like to get some info on whether there are any problems with those or nothing a fw update wouldn't fix.

Drives in question:

OCZ Petrol
OCZ Vertex Plus
OCZ Agility 3
Corsair Nova

Some Sandforce, some Indilinx, all 60GB and cost similar - which one is the best bet?

BTW I have SATA2 mobo, so no problem with that.

Thanks in advance for replies.

[Original Sin]

I wouldn't get any of those Rafal... the Vertex Plus uses an EOL controller, the Agility3 is just poor(there's no interleaving for 60/64 GB drives and that results in trash performance for SF2k drives), the Petrol is also a very cheap Indilinx implementation, there's not much relevant info to be found about the Nova, so I'd be skeptical about such a purchase.

[rafal_iB_PL]

Thanks. So I guess ponying up a bit to Crucial M4 64GB isn't a bad idea (plus fw update if necessary)

[Original Sin]

Originally Posted by rafal_iB_PL

Thanks. So I guess ponying up a bit to Crucial M4 64GB isn't a bad idea (plus fw update if necessary)

Yeah, for 60/64GB drives you basically have 3 options... the 830 from Samsung which is easily the best, the M4 from Crucial and the Chronos Deluxe from Mushkin which uses 34nm toggle NAND from Toshiba which means two way interleaving and performance typical to 120GB SF2K drives using 2Xnm Sync NAND(HyperX, Vertex3, ForceGT, etc) and twice the r/w cycles.. but it's still SandForce and there's no guarantee that Intel will share the "Golden" FW with the rest of the SF2k integrators.

[rafal_iB_PL]

Big thanks, Crucial it is then (checked other two, but either not very available or quite a bit more expensive).

[walterm]

Toms has a comparison on 60 GB SSDs, but best I can tell from various readings the Crucial M4 is probably the most reliable for the lowest price.
OCZ Petrol has bad reports now.

[rafal_iB_PL]

Crucial has come, FW updated, this thing rocks - W7 welcome screen literally flashes, loading times cut in half, work with Visual Studio just got a lot more convenient - just what you'd expect. One thing - HDD needs to spin-up when accessing its contents, so it got slowed down a bit - guess I should move more stuff to SSD.

[jonny.nguyen2]

i just swapped out my 60gb for a 120g to get some more head room, the 60 just wasn't enough space to mess around with.

jn