What's a reasonably future proof (good) SSD that also works on an Abit IP35 Pro XE ?

Hi,

I'm fairly happy with my current home system, which you can see described in my stats. It handles most current games rather well, with perhaps the occasional title causing the CPU to be a bottleneck.

I'd like to get an SSD to boot from, and have a budget of around £150 ish. (Can stretch a tad for something more). I really enjoy how snappy an SSD makes my work machine and would like to add the same to my home rig.

I'm a bit hampered by my aging Abit mobo (though what a good mobo it is), so I know I won't be able to run it in SATA 3 mode, only SATA 2. When/if I do my next build, I'll definitely reuse the SSD and get the most value out of it as I'll likely get a current gen mobo that fully supports SATA 3. Also, I'd like the opportunity to maybe reuse the SSD in a Macbook using an Optibay if it strikes my fancy in the future, so a form factor that would fit the Optibay would be great.

I was considering:

Samsung 830 128GB
Crucial M4 128GB
Corsair Performance Pro 128GB

and was going to use it as a boot drive, plus Steam and a few titles.

but then I read :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/tests-...w-32353-4.html

and can see that the Samsung's 64GB version ain't half bad either.

So, what will work with my mobo in SATA 2 mode, work with an Optibay and is good value for money given all the above ?

I've done some general google-fu but my Abit mobo is rather long in the tooth now, so hardly any threads mentioning it and SSD together.

Your advice is much appreciated.

Azoth.

I'm going to make my usual comment, which is this: don't worry about performance.

Buy a good quality SSD that performs well, with a good warranty and reliable firm behind it. Whether it does 200MB/s or 250MB/s is going to make absolutely no difference to your life. Maybe if you're trying to assemble a huge corporate database, but as a home user it doesn't matter. 5400rpm drives are very slow, 7200rpm drives are quite slow, and good quality SSDs are blisteringly fast. A different SSD will also be blisteringly fast. I don't believe anyone would be able to tell the speed of an SSD whilst using a PC unless they had a stopwatch and timed huge file transfers. Day to day, a good SSD is a good SSD, and that's all that matters.

jim pretty much nailed it on the head, the important parts with SSD are the reliability and how it maintains itself (TRIM etc).

Certainly grab a crucial m4 as theyre fast, reliable and TRIM works well with them i.e the drive doesnt crawl to a halt after awhile.

(trim is good with every drive now but i feel the m4 just does better).

Avoid sandforce, to many BSOD and for some reason performance drops are more noticeable due to compressible and incompressible data... if you can keep it to compressible data they're fast but overall the M4 with the latest firmware is stonkingly fast.

The samsung drive is to new to really assess its reliability, the m4 is over a year old now (i think?) and majority of issues are sorted instantly, mine havent skipped a beat.


m4 128gb is £137 at amazon currently and possibly cheaper elsewhere :).

Looking at the crucial it uses the marvel controller (curical m4/intel) which is excellent, the results look good however the price is a bit more than the m4, albeit it looks as if its faster by a reasonable amount however the truth is will you ever notice it :P. It uses the reliable marvel controller however there are other factors to consider with reliability so id say its to early to tell if its a winner.

Get whatever is cheapest overall though while avoiding sandforce and you cant really go wrong.

I guess I do get carried away with benchmark sometimes. I think its part of the drive to get the absolute best for the limited amount of cash that I have.

How about the Intels then ? I've read there's a nasty bug with the 320s. Is it worth picking up an older model e.g. x25 ?

Crucial M4 is pretty decent and the Samsung 830 has the potential to be a very good drive if anything like the preceding Samsung 470. Also,don't discount older SSDs which have all their bugs worked out too.

Crucial M4 ftw.. never heard anyone complaining about them tbh, other drives i've read a fair few reviews about firmware etc problems.