quest_for_silence wrote:dhanson865 wrote:For Win 7 users the Crucial/Micron M4 seems like the place to be to me.
What about these
findings/reasonings?
That was the last review I read before posting the pricing update.
I read that review page for page and was shocked when they still recommended Sandforce drives with as little reservations as they did.
If I ever saw a sandforce drive even half as reliable as the X-25M Gen 2 I'd happily through it into the mix of drives I consider reliable. There was a period this year I came close to making that call but then the BSOD errors got worse and got more attention. I'm not going to put a drive in a PC that could cost me money in lost business from a client or get me fired by a boss with no willingness to forgive others mistakes. All it'd take is one drive showing an issue like that and my name would be mud.
Now if you want to tackle issues with the M4 and say it is unreliable I'm listening, but so far the worst I heard about them was the usual backup your data before doing a firmware update drama that bites the careless. Not great but not enough for me to wipe them off the list. Especially since they are the dominant price leader everyone else is following and they recently released a firmware that dramatically improved performance for non server use.
And yes, CA_Steve was right. The thread title implies that any SSD I bother to track is fast enough that I don't consider the speed differences my primary concern in choosing between these drives. In order of importance (which might change every time you ask me) I'll say today that the order is:
* Form factor / compatibility (not usually an issue but with mSATA, PCIe, and other odd SSDs you do occasionally have to think about it)
* OS support (Intel Toolbox being the pinnacle, best possible support)
* Reliability (the Intel controller based drives top this, followed by Marvell based drives, though I don't know where Samsung fits they might jump in this mix)
* Absolute cost (not cost divided by capacity, just the plain simple cost of the drive)
* Capacity & Performance (not divided by either, just that performance varies by capacity within series so my pick at 64GB might be a loser at 120/128 GB and there might be a 3rd different winner at 256GB. I'm not worried about capacity as even a 40GB drive is perfectly usable as a boot drive but price wise the 32GB and 40GB drives have dropped off the list because 64GB drives beat the snot out of them in both price/GB and performance. I could go on and on about Capacity or Performance not being important but lets go to the next factor
* Power consumption (it's a rare SSD that scares me on power consumption as they all tend to blow away the 3.5" hard drives in the average consumers PC (think 7200 RPM WD/Seagate))
I don't seriously consider putting any drive in my PC that costs over $100, but I consider more expensive drives where capacity or other people's use come into play.
This is not the thread where you argue about the fastest SSD or the one that is best for gaming. It doesn't matter if 30 different websites say that a drive not on my list is the best SSD ever made.
This is the thread where you discuss the best budget SSD or if there is such a thing as a budget SSD. It's the thread were you discuss price changes in general and might mention that if you plan to use them in PC x for use y that drive z is a good choice because it's cheaper than another but still good enough that you won't have buyers remorse.
You are more than willing to say you like a drive that I don't list but at least say you think its worth x% more dollars or compare two real world prices while saying it's a better drive than the one you don't like. Join in, say what you want, but just like the game show jeopardy asks you to answer in the form of a question I'm asking you to post in this thread in the form of "is it really worth the cost difference?" or "how much more is it worth than," and so on.
But then it is only a request. You don't have to do what I say.