SSD Buying Guide

BJNY said:

960GB for less than $600 announced:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6614/microncrucial-announces-m500-ssd-line-of-ssds

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Krafty said:

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Ordered last Friday, just came today via Amazon with ground shipping (FedEx + USPS).

Pretty quick.
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soutcut said:

Hello, does anyone know if there has been an update of Hellhammer's recommendation of Intel 320 series SSD's for pre 2011 MBP's ?

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alohamade said:

Oh man, that has me excited! This year is the year where SSDs are going to hit a very nice bottom in prices!

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AlbumLeaves said:

I'm finally getting around to doing this upgrade. In reading about the m5, it sounds like it has some very strong benefits compared to the m4. On the other hand, the m4 is affordable for me right now and I'm sure the m5 will cost a pretty penny as it starts to roll out. Should I buy the m4 now or wait for the m5?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W2JL3Y/

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davidlv said:

Did you really mean that "unreliable"?
Irregardless of the corporation's record, I must admit Intel has some very competent engineers, and they use Sandforce controllers in their SSD products.
As far as I know their SSDs have a very good reputation for reliability, maybe the best on the market. How does that make the Sandforce "unreliable"?😕
The conclusion I have reached from info in this thread, etc., is that the Sandforce drives vary somewhat depending on the firmware, but in general, due to the way they compress data when writing, is that certain benchmarks that use compressed data show slow results for Sandforce drives. The idea is that for use with a large number of large compressed files, video files etc. a non-Sandforce drive will be faster, but for ordinary use the Sandforce drives are really fast enough. That has been my personal experience (admitted very little), in any case.

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AlbumLeaves said:

I'm finally getting around to doing this upgrade. In reading about the m5, it sounds like it has some very strong benefits compared to the m4. On the other hand, the m4 is affordable for me right now and I'm sure the m5 will cost a pretty penny as it starts to roll out. Should I buy the m4 now or wait for the m5?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W2JL3Y/

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dmk1974 said:

I just got a 13" uMBP and have 2 SSD drives from other machines that I can install. The choices are:

128 GB Samsung 830 SSD
256 GB Crucial M4 SSD

I don't keep hardly any media on my laptop since I have a home server. More space is always better, but I had read that the 830 may be faster than the M4 though. If true, then speed vs space? Or realistically is the speed the same? Thanks!

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VanTastic said:

Hi,

I'm planning on buying a Samsung 840 Pro for my Macbook Pro, but it's an early 2011 MBP and I've heard that the SATA ports have some compatibility issues. Given the price of the SSDs I wanna be sure that it is going to work properly, so is there any way to know in advance if the SATA is gonna play nice with the SSD ?

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VanTastic said:

Hi,

I'm planning on buying a Samsung 840 Pro for my Macbook Pro, but it's an early 2011 MBP and I've heard that the SATA ports have some compatibility issues. Given the price of the SSDs I wanna be sure that it is going to work properly, so is there any way to know in advance if the SATA is gonna play nice with the SSD ?

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phased said:

Hi all,

I'd like to know the same thing with my mid-2009 MBP 17". Thanks!

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Donia330i said:

Sorry, couldn't read through all 78 pages but can someone tell me the best SSD to get for 2.0 GHz Alum Late 2008 MB? Brand/size/specs? Thanks!

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r2shyyou said:

I don't have a recommendation for you but for future reference, you can search within this thread (and any other thread) so that you don't have to read through every page.

A search for "2008" reduces those 78 pages to only 3.

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Donia330i said:

oh thanks! Just joined yesterday so still learning.

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macmee said:

I have a 2011 13" MBP and I don't know which SSD would be better for me:

250GB
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147189
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147186

128/120GB
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147188
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147192

Or would I really notice the speed increase if I forked over the extra cash for this
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147193

I didn't want to spend that much money, but I would prefer 25Xgb if I can. I'm fairly certain that most people say the 840 series is better than the M4 in terms of idling power, but if there's another SSD that's cheaper and gives me 25Xgb with no more drain on battery I would certainly be interested in that!

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Spink10 said:

Just grab a Sammy 840 🙂

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macmee said:

Do you know if I need the one I posted that comes with all the screws and cables and stuff or if the one without those things is fine?

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First of all, the Samsung 840 uses triple-level cell (TLC) memory vs. the multi-level cell (MLC) memory used for almost all other SSDs. So what is the difference between TLC and MLC? With TLC memory, 3 bits of information (8 possible values) are stored per cell instead of the 2 bits (4 possible values) in MLC memory. This might sound better but it also means that the cells are used more and there is less voltage fault tolerance. In the most simple terms, you can think of cells being "filled" or "emptied" by applying voltage. When 3 bits (8 possible values) of information are stored per cell, the SSD may have to apply voltage to the entire cell multiple times even though just one bit of information is encoded (depending on the bit being changed). The multiple voltage applications to each cell also slows down the write speeds and causes more wear in general.

Performance-wise, the Samsung 840 is actually worse than the previous generation Samsung 830. On the Passmark benchmarks, it is slightly lower than the OCZ Agility 4 which uses asynchronous MLC NAND flash.

Right now, the top three SSDs (best selling and best reviews) on Amazon are the OCZ Vertex 4, Samsung 830, and the Crucial M4. However, all three of these SSDs are cheaper and they perform better than the Samsung 840. Eventually, the TLC NAND should mean that the Samsung 840 will sell for less because less NAND is used. However, it is not worth it right now. To be safe, I would say that you should wait until the drive is at least 10-20% cheaper than the three drives above due to the uncertainty of how it will perform in the long run.

One puzzling thing is that I couldn't find any mean time before failure (MTBF) estimates for the 840, while the MTBF for the 20nm MLC based 840 Pro is 1.5 million hours (lower than the 2 million hours for many 25nm MLC drives). Also, it is interesting that the drives are not 128GB, 256GB, 512GB. There are probably three reasons for this. The TLC NAND manufacturing process has lower yields so they have to "turn off" a portion of the cells to account for this. This is similar to what Nvidia does for their GPUs (16 functional streaming multiprocessors become GTX 580, 14-15 functional streaming multiprocessors become a GTX 570, etc...) Another possibility is that they anticipate that there will be more wear to the TLC NAND so that there is an unused memory bank to replace any dead cells. The third and most likely reason is a combination of the two, i.e. a portion of the turned off cells are nonfunctional due to the new manufacturing process and the remaining portion of the turned off cells are reserved for replacement.

I handle tech purchase decisions for my department and so I bought one Samsung 840 to test for due diligence but won't buy more until they become much cheaper.

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You are quite the little liar trolling for votes. You published this same misleading review for the 250 GB drive only, but you said in a comment there you only had use of the 120 GB drive! To continue, you claim to be some type of IT at a business considering using this drive, when no intelligent IT would even consider a consumer grade drive for business use. Actual people in such business operations only consider the two other memory type SSD platforms due to their more predictable use and their longer MTBF. I suppose you want others here to think Amazon "misplaced" your review here for the 250 GB kit when you have purposely placed it here - again for a 250 GB drive you never had use of, and of the kit you also have obviously never used. You also haven't bothered to mentioned the kit items, since you never had them. Have a wonderful life liar. You can fool all of the people some of the time - but you can't fool everyone all of the time. Abraham Lincoln would have opened you to ridicule for such writing as you've cobbled together here from what you've read and pieced together from the Internet.

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