With my ancient OCZ Vertex 3 possibly approaching the end of its life and the 120GB not being enough storage for the OS and my games, I thought it'd be a smashing idea to upgrade to a newer, bigger SSD.
Looking for SSDs in the 100-130€ price range (on Amazon.de; 135-175$ for y'all 'Muricans).
So far I've stumbled across these contenders:
a) SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
b) Samsung 840 EVO 250GB
c) OCZ Vertex 460 240GB
d) Crucial M550 256GB
Uses: NO video/picture editing. Only OS & Games.
Requirements: Fast OS boot time & game load times (which I'm sure they all fulfill), Decent IOPS (4k random read & write performance), Reliability, Longevity (ca. 3 years)
Any recommendations for the above-mentioned SSDs or other suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I would go with the Crucial m500 or m550 personally they are good performers and reliable. They also do not suffer form performance loss with age like some drives such as the samsungs although the samsung drives are still great too.
Any of those should be sufficient for your use, they are all manufacturers of their own products which is a plus. I have a crucial 550 in the laptop its solid. I have a Corsair Force GT 240gb in this machine I love and have the OS in this machine on just a kingston V300 120 gb SSD(the syncronous one, be careful getting this drive) the one I have is solid as well. In short with the saturated SSD market in the 240/256gb range companies are forced to push quality to compete with a little research you can't go wrong. You just want a good solid read speed drive and pay close attention to your 4k reads benchmark for gaming.
I game on the Corsair Force GT and couldn't be happier to do so DAMN fast drive.
I recently purchased a 256GB Crucial MX100 for $110. It's been really fast, but I don't have any other SSDs to compare it to, so I sort of think it might be on the slightly lower end when it comes to speed. It's on the cheaper side though, so if you're willing to sacrifice a small amount of performance you should be able to save a decently large amount of money.
It's also worth noting that since the MX100 series was only released last month, they may or may not be available in your country. Here's the anandtech review on the MX100 series, if you're interested: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8066/crucial-mx100-256gb-512gb-review