ces wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:
Intel 510 "Emcrest" SSD? No announced release date, parts are listed on Intel Website.
How long after they become available will it take for you to have enough info to move them to your tier 2 category?
The short answer is "I don't know".
If they are good enough they'll be in the Tier 1 category. Right now they are in the unknown tier. You could call that tier the unproven, bleeding edge, newly listed. I'm sure if you thought about it you could come up with dozens or even hundreds of labels for that tier.
I won't move them until I see at least one high quality review. Not saying the review has to say the drive is high quality, I'm saying the review process has to be high quality. A proper review could drop them quite a bit or it could confirm they need to stay high on the list.
I also won't move them until they are available for sale in quantity and I have real world pricing information. If every reviewer on the planet had one last month but Newegg, Amazon, SuperBiiz, NextWarehouse, CostCentral, etcetera didn't even have a listing I'd have no price to put next to the drive no matter what tier it belongs in performance or reliability wise.
Reliability will move a drive up more than mediocre performance will pull it down. Bad reliabiltiy will pull a drive down more than high performance will move it up. If its too slow it just doesn't make my list. I may be wrong but I doubt new drives coming out this year will be too slow to make the list. I'm assuming the last drives that slow were released in 2010.
As to moving a new drive into a Tier I'll give it the benefit of the doubt if no reliability info is out and assume it is reliable and choose the Tier based on Performance, OS Support (Intel Toolbox is a big plus), and price/performance. Price/Performance is why Indilinx drives are down so low. They are fast enough to be used in an average PC just not as fast as other drives that have the same price per GB.
I may get it wrong on the first classification and if so I'll adjust the tiers as more information comes out.
since I'm here I think I'll do a $1.88 wrap up
Code:
Crucial C300 64GB ~$120 ~$1.88/GB CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1
Intel X25-M 120GB ~$225 ~$1.88/GB SSDSA2MH120G2K5
Crucial C300 128GB ~$240 ~$1.88/GB CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1
Samsung 470 128GB ~$242 ~$1.89/GB MZ-5PA128/US
Samsung 470 256GB ~$480 ~$1.88/GB MZ-5PA256/US
Crucial C300 256GB ~$480 ~$1.88/GB CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1
That's your value choices right now. 3 different drive manufacturers, 3 capacities.
XP/Vista users would do well to stick with the Intel G2 120GB right now but they could pay a little extra for the Samsung 470 and still have a utitily to handle the OSes lack of TRIM support.
If you are adventurous and don't need much space you could do the C300 without TRIM support and do all the tweaking to reduce unnecessary writes (especially by putting all your application and temp directories on a storage drive). Worst case scenario a quarterly or semiannual secure erase would pep things up though you'd have to be the type that doesn't mind reinstalling your OS for the fun of it to really go that route.
I have no idea what the average Mac user would think. I'd be tempted to do the Intel and occasionally dual boot into windows to run the intel toolbox. Of course I'd use Time Machine to back up all the data before trying it. And I'd probably test it as a secondary drive so I could benchmark it and see if the toolbox make much of a difference when used in this fashion.
Assuming you are using a new enough version of linux to have TRIM support the C300 64GB seems like a value winner.
Win 7 goes the same way, C300 64GB is a cheap option in this crowd.
Of course one new drive from Intel or Micron/Crucial/Marvel (C400) and you could be in for a massive case of buyers remorse. If you are buying drives for work PCs you take the bird in hand and stay with Intel as the most reliable drive. If you are buying for home use or have extreme needs at work you probably should wait and see what comes next.