What are the best 256GB SSDs?

Hardware Hub Storage
1

Hi everyone

So pretty much what I want to know is "what are the best 256(240/250/256)GB SSDs out right now?

By this I mean:

 

Best speeds (so obviously just anything over 500 give or take for read and writes)

Most reliable controller

And as a bonus, best packaged software/warranties

 

I live in New Zealand, so some products may be scarce, but I should be able to find most :)

 

Thanks

2

Whatever is the latest premium Samsung drive.

Edit: So that's the 850 pro. The 830 and 840 are still worth a look.

3

yeah. samsung. crucial seems OK too. The lower tier samsung are only less than 100 mb/s slower than the top tier stuff in synthetic test meaning you can't tell the difference

4

Ah ok cool, so it's the pros the are better than the evos?

5

Yep. Not much difference in terms of speed, but there's no compromise on the NAND Flash or the controller on the pros. Samsung software is quite good, too.

6

Cool :) thanks for that!

7

Also the Samsungs have the Rapid feature - use system RAM to cache your ssd for insane write speeds - Last I checked my 840 pro had a sequential write speed of 4325mb/s sequential read of 5629 mb/s

8

MX100 is pretty good, competitive with the 840 evo. Not as good as the 850 pro but it's a lot cheaper.

9

The MX100 doesn't seem to put up anything close to the #'s of the 840 EVO. The closest crucial product to it is the 550 I think. My EVO without RAPID enabled is running 540 read 530 write 97,000 IOPS read 76,000 Write. No review on the MX100 puts it in the ballpark. I would go EVO or that 900 series ADATA or Plextor M6S.  

Most reviews put that MX100 at low 500's sequential read and 150 or 300 write depending on model. For Random IOPS Reads look to be more 80,000ish in reads and again crap on the writes. Its not in the same class as the samsung 840 series drives at all. 

10

At least in benchmarks, the 256GB versions trade blows: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1221?vs=965

If you have a 512GB version, yeah, that's going to be a lot faster than the 256 GB. I haven't really paid much attention to the 512GB version of the MX100 though so I don't know how they compare.

Edit: I just looked at the actual read/write speeds, and yes, the 840 evo is faster. Benchmarks still show them trading blows though. Also, you have to bear in mind that the MSRP for the 840 evo is $190 whereas the MX100 is $110.

11

If I were to buy a drive tomorrow for a typical home system I would get the Samsung 840 Evo.  As it offers the best price/performance ratio.

12

I guarantee you cannot tell the difference between all those SSDs in real world applications. Those numbers you're seeing are theoretical peaks and can only be reached during optimal conditions.

My two cents: go for the drive that has the best warranty, reliability, and price-performance ratio.

(Since arguing over semantics isn't helping the OP, I decided to remove my extra comments.)

13

You have to factor in the longevity of some of these premium drives. For some people, that's a price worth paying.

14

Isn't it just amazing when you have a website that tells you all these things?

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/

You can search by capacity and brand.. By default you can sort by overall value, effective speed, read, write, age, and price. You can add in 4k read and writes, user ratings, and much more! Although I wouldn't really buy any SSD other than for your OS or permanent drive. Most SSDs have extremely short write cycles, and ultimately a short lifespan (at least in comparison to HDD).

15

"Most SSDs have extremely short write cycles [..]"


I consider this to be hearsay.

"[..] ultimately a short lifespan (at least in comparison to HDD)."


I think you are wrong.

First of all, it's workload related:

  • Reads don't affect the lifespan of SSDs, but they do affect the lifespan of hard drives.
  • Random writes and reads kill a hard drive a lot faster because that involves a lot of movement from the platter and the read/write head, while SSDs are just fine. What affects the endurance of SSDs is only the amount of data written to it.
  • There is a storage benchmark being run on a website (forgot the name, you can google it). The Samsung EVO died at about 900 TB, and it has TLC nand. There are still SSDs in the benchmark that are running consistently after 1,000 TB of data written to them.
16

Yes it is work related. It still has shorter write cycles. Why would they be developing newer technology to overcome this? 

http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssds-overcome-write-endurance-with-hot-technology/a/d-id/899730

 

It's also not the amount of data, rather the amount of times its written to. The drives themselves, even the Evo, is weak. The cells themselves are much weaker compared to HDD.

http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment

 

I guess everyone else is wrong? Basic users will not have many problems but once you go into raids, servers, and constant writes, as someone like myself does, they'll end up failing you. The enterprise ssd is another story, but I've only used consumer drives of both hdd and ssd.. Maybe that's made my view biased.

Maybe this is the site you were talking about?

http://ssdendurancetest.com/

17

Plextor M6s is not a bad drive either

18

So I'm looking for a new SSD

The two in this thread that have stood out are the Crucial MX100 and the Samsungs.

I'm really confused which I should get, I plan to use it to replace my Desktop EVO 840 (120gb) that I plan to plop into my laptop which is on the way.

19

Plextor M6E or OCZ Revodrive

20

samsung xp941 http://www.ramcity.com.au/buy/samsung-xp941-256gb-m.2-ngff-pcie-ssd-2280/MZHPU256HCGL-00000