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My go to drives have become the Samsung 840 EVO series. Great drives, good price, just excellent all around. But i'm curious about penny pinching for a drive that will most likely forever be destined for SATA II (3Gb/s). I built 10 machines for a client a while back based on the AMD 785 chipset, with Athlon X3's (Rana 445's). The machines are starting to show a little bit of a need for more speed and the drive is the first thing that will speed them up. While my instinct tells me to just go with the 840 EVO, It almost feels wrong to put a drive with that kind of speed in a machine that will only utilize about 1/2 of it. So I'm curious if there are other, less expensive options that still are rock solid in performance (on SATA II) and reliability. Currently I can get 840 EVO 120gb drives for roughly $87 while the 250gb version run 130-140. I'd like to shoot for a 250gb drive as that leaves them plenty of room for files.

Knowing this customer, they will use these drives/computers until they can't turn them on anymore, which with some of the parts I've used to build them could be another 10 years lol. Anyone have a good drive to recommend as a cheap alternative to the 840 EVO, 240-250gb? If its not a good amount cheaper then perhaps sticking with the tried and true in 120 may be the way to go.

Recent bait-and-switch scandal aside, I've been happy (so far) with the Kingstons I own. They seem to provide decent bang-for-the-buck. There may be a bit of a "Deathstar effect" happening here, where they are pricing them aggressively for a while to try and win back market share.

Or just stick with the Samsungs. If they are priced competitively it is silly to worry about getting a drive that is "too fast" for the system.

Crucial MX100.

Yeah the bait-n-switch thing had me a bit concerned. Was PNY also accused of this right?

Which Kingston's where you referring to? Its not that I was worried about them being too fast, just not wanting to pay the premium for the higher performance if I know I can get a drive slightly slower that will perform the same in every aspect but be cheaper. I've considered the Crucial drives, but had a few small bumps with the Crucial's back in the M4 days.

Yeah, PNY also pulled some sh*t.

The two cheap KIngstons I've been using are from their "SSDNow V300" line.

First off: you're sure they're not memory constrained, correct? An SSD will help if the slowdown is happening because they're overcommitted and paging to disk, but putting more RAM in the machine will help a lot more. I'm amazed at how much memory AJAX-heavy web pages can consume, so "office users" sometimes trip over this despite not doing anything you'd associate with workstation-style work.

Welch wrote:

While my instinct tells me to just go with the 840 EVO, It almost feels wrong to put a drive with that kind of speed in a machine that will only utilize about 1/2 of it.

Are they regularly doing 100MB+ disk operations (streaming, file copies, video editing, etc?) They probably aren't -- that's an unusual use case (and typically ends up spec'd with larger drives) -- and if they aren't, then the throughput speed of the SATA interface isn't going to make any real difference. What will make a significant difference is the very low access latency of an SSD vs an HD, and that's largely independent of the SATA version. In other words, most users will actually utilize closer to 90% of the real benefit of an SSD, no matter what kind of connection it is on.

Flying Fox wrote:

Crucial MX100.

Coincidentally, I'm visiting my elderly aunt at the moment and will be putting a 256 GB MX100 into her Wolfdale Core 2 Duo tomorrow, and I gave very little worry to the fact that it is SATA II-only (I was happy to see it was already in AHCI mode and the current HD was already aligned correctly, as that will make a bigger difference in real-world performance and saves me a bunch of futzing). I'll post back later on the results -- based on a similar operation I performed on a Turion-based machine a couple of years ago, I expect they'll vary from unnoticeable to dramatic depending on the operation.