Time for a new toy for my computer and it's going to be SSD time. Looking at my current Win7/Mint set up the OS/application area takes up about 120GB so a 240/250Gb SSD will suffice and is now within a reasonable budget of £120~£150.

Any recommendations? I'll be keeping my current conventional 1TB drive for data and just put the apps/OS on the SSD. I'll also probably triple boot Win7/Win8.1/Mint if that has any bearing.

The Samsung Evo 840 gets good reviews

I'm just building a gaming rig. I went for Two 120GB SSD's in RAID 0. Two Kingston HyperX 3K's were on offer at £68 each at Dabs last week. The build quality is amazing.

That was a good deal as they're £87 at DABs now, at least for the kits, were yours bare drive for that price? I hadn't really thought of pairing up 120GB drives as that could make it even cheaper. Saying that however, I'm a bit reticent to go RAID0 on my main machine which is what this is. This is mainly because I've suffered the consequences of having to recover data from a failed array when REALLY needing that data back and it wasn't a pleasant experience. At least with a failed larger drive you can just slave it and read off it. The 240GB version of that drive are within budget at £140 though. Out of interest, why the Hyper X rather than the slightly cheaper V300?

I'll look into the Samsung suggestion too.

As recommended by someone knowledgeable: don't put SSD's in RAID. I don't remember the reason.

I've got a Kingston 128 Gig SSD next to 2 x 2TB pairs in RAID-0 (of which one used to contain the system as well) and the SSD has improved system response and application performance in a very impressive way.

The Samsung has been getting very good reviews and comes at a good price. I'd personally go for the often favoured Sandforce controller in an Intel 520/530 or Kingston HyperX 3K however. Top choice if money wasn't an issue would be an OCZ.

Why OCZ in particular? I understand they're a fairly reliable RAM manufacturer but why them over the other options? Understood regarding the controller but whose silicon is getting used downstream of that?

They were the full retail version Wishy. Went for two in RAID as it's faster than a single 250gb drive, and as it's a gaming PC I just want maximum performance. I've got my lappy for everything else. Here's my spec:

Zalman Z11 Plus case - Bitfenix Recon Multi fan controller
MSI Z87-G43 Mobo
Core i5-4440 'Haswell' CPU - Freezer 7 Pro cooler
16GB 2100mhz Corsair Vengeance Pro RAM
600w corsair PSU
MSI GTX 770 OC GPU
2 x Kingston 3k SSD's

...bring on the overclocking!

That was very cheap then. I understand why you'd use Raid 0 for a gaming PC, it's just that my requirements are different. I use mine for work a lot and hence lack of any downtime if something went wrong is more important to me than speed.

I agree, it is less stable than one

Would this be worth the extra few pennies?

I'll have a better read of this later.

Another option from quickly looking at that review is this.

OCZ Vertex 3.20 or OCZ Vertex 4 because of speed.

There's only a couple of companies producing the NAND memory so it's mostly about the controller.

You weren't joking about the "if money weren't an option" aspect, they're a step up again in price from the Vector I linked above.

Having had time to look through that review, the Crucial drive is currently looking favourite. This will probably be the last upgrade for my current rig so I'm going to stick to the original budget (especially seeing as last month I took my budget for a new mobile phone and threw it out of the window before spending 4 times what I'd originally planned ).

The machine probably doesn't have much that I can add to it. It's up to capacity on RAM and CPU speed and there isn't much point getting anything better than the GTX480 it has given I don't play games on it. MiniWishy does but he doesn't pay the bills so he can just live with it.

It will last another couple of years before I consider replacing the motherboard. At that point it will be major upgrade time and this drive will make a perfect laptop upgrade. The larger capacity drives should be in reach by then and I can look at possibly going PCI-SSD only (or whatever is looking best then) for the whole system.

I'm now just waiting for my credit card to reach the end of it's billing month so I don't have to pay for this in and amongst all the Christmas presents I've been buying.

OCZ just annouced bankruptcy today, you may not want to touch their SSD's atm.

I'm running Plextor SSD's in RAID1. On some controllers RAID1 gives the same read performance as RAID0 as it uses both drives interleaved. The Intel controller on my motherboard does this but others don't, so it's worth checking.

Obviously write performance is slower, but you are protected against single drive failure.

Sandisk SSD's seem to be getting very good reviews lately, I'd have a look at those if I were buying now.

Crucial wouldn't be on my list. Throughput is a lot lower in the reviews I've seen, but these might be different / newer ones? Once I saw were 50% slower than others.

It's a newer drive on that list and it came top of the review I was looking at which included independent performance testing. However, looking at Crucial's own figures it looks like the performance of the lower capacity drives in that series aren't as good as the higher capacity ones. I may think again as the one in the test was a 480Gb and I'm looking at a 240Gb in the same series.

That might mean that they could be had for very cheap sometime quite soon. I've never had a hard drive fail within warranty (plenty afterwards) and I've never needed after sales support for one so maybe I shouldn't be that bothered....

Will have another look later but probably the Samsung as it stands.

And in sympathy my SSD OCZ crashed yesterday, on my new (April) PC - no doubt will get another brand as a replacement under warrenty

Good will gesture then, as they should get replaced under factory warranty, not sales warranty.

Ordered. Thanks as always for your input.

been looking into this my self info was great n here .... looks like Samsung for me

Good choice. I'm hoping to unwrap one myself in a few days :-)

got the samsung SSD ... computer boots up faster than my router now got a 7.7 on the windows performace thingy on th hdd

I've got a 250GB Samsung sitting here waiting to go in. The only thing that's stopping me is trying to decide whether to give it a fresh install, or dump some data off my current drive and copy it over.

Decisions, decisions.....might have a bash at it this weekend sometime.

Finally got my gaming PC running yesterday. Had a problem with the date/time resetting and it was preventing me from activating my Windows 7. Changed the motherboard battery and all was well. Can't believe how fast it boots with an SSD drive, it's quicker than my xbox!
Runs every game so far on max detail, very pleased

Yep, Windows 7 with SSD, at last a computer that starts in an acceptable time

Interesting that if you have exactly the same drive as me. I couldn't resist checking and found I got a 7.4 with the score being restricted by the lowest scoring component which was .....


wait for it....




CPU/RAM both 7.5 and Graphics are 7.9. How come, less efficient SATAIII controller on the motherboard? But other than that, the speed is good, very good. Photoshop and 3D CAD start up is almost instant now.

Photoshop is marvellous on a SSD. 3 seconds startup.

My Kingston drive gets a 7.8 score. Admittedly, I have 24 GB of high speed RAM on three channels, which I heard can make a difference.

with 16GB high speed RAM

No, with 8gb too