Over the next few months I'm looking to make make the upgrade from HDD to SSD, and was wondering which one do you all recomend on me getting? I'm looking for either 120GB-250GB (depending on what my budget allows).
Also my budget will be around £100-180.
but what kind of SSD's? Speeds at 500/500 are good, if the price is right.
Personally, I only buy SandForce based SSDs as it's the only controller that has the potential to give a write amplification less than 1, and lifetime of the drive/data is a big concern to me.
There are a few SandForce partners making drives not using RAISE, giving capacities of 128GB vs 120GB etc, which I also would tend to avoid because of my primary desire for data retention/life expectancy of the drive.
After that, If I can find a good deal on one that uses toggle NAND, I'll get that, synchronous as a 2nd best, and if I must.. asychronous if on a major budget.
However, at smaller pricepoints, such as the 120GB models, you have to start comparing parallel channels of the drive, as the new higher density NAND chips can allow manufactures to cheaply build small drives with fewer chips.
Therefore, even though it's Toggle NAND, a SanDisk Extreme 120GB is worse than a synchronous NAND 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 in general performance.
In the case of the SanDisk Extreme, you're also looking at 19nm NAND technology vs 25-34nm for older Sandforce Gen2 drives, meaning you're more likely to suffer the wrath of limited PE cycles sooner.
Otherwise, top choices for me go towards OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Mushkin Chronos Deluxe, Patriot Wildfire, etc... as these are all Toggle NAND drives w/ Gen2 SandForce controllers. Right near those, one of the best Synchronous NAND SandForce 2xxx drives is the Intel 520.
If low write amplification / spotty compressed data performance isn't your thing however, most people recommend the Samsung 840 Pro (and the older 830 was top rated in it's day). Just make sure you avoid the non pro 840, as it uses tri-level NAND doubling capacity per square inch of wafer, but drastically lowering life expectancy.
After that, you're mostly left with a bunch of players using marvel based controllers these days, where again.. the main focus would be to avoid asynchronous NAND for performance, and tri-level NAND for longevity. Pick any.
Older drives are likely to use larger nm lithography techniques and should have more program-erase cycles, If you can live with slightly less performance, it could be a wise investment to get those clearanced models.
Word of caution, avoid 600mbps SATA3 drives if you have a SATA2 nForce controller, such as a i790 based board.
I have a sumsung 840 series 120gb and i love it. Theyre very solid/reliable drives.