Best Solid State Drives for the Money (Tom's Hardware)

[Saxito Pau]

Tom's have launched their first article for "Best SSDs for the Money" series. Check it out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssd-price-per-gb-ssd-performance,2880.html

[W1nTry]

Sadly these drives are still prohibitively expensive. Imho it doesn't make sense with going any smaller than 80GB and that's just for OS and maybe most played games. And that already is 180USD. In a laptop it would make alot of sense as that eliminates one of the largest bottlenecks, but for large scale use in your gaming desktop... the same money could buy a decent GPU, CPU or MUCH larger drives. Until the 80GB hits the 100USD mark I not even considering.

[Netizen1]

I'd also like to see SSD's come down in price... under $2 per GB for me to seriously consider one

[Philosophical45]

Sadly these drives are still prohibitively expensive. Imho it doesn't make sense with going any smaller than 80GB and that's just for OS and maybe most played games. And that already is 180USD. In a laptop it would make alot of sense as that eliminates one of the largest bottlenecks, but for large scale use in your gaming desktop... the same money could buy a decent GPU, CPU or MUCH larger drives. Until the 80GB hits the 100USD mark I not even considering.

^This

I'd also like to see SSD's come down in price... under $2 per GB for me to seriously consider one

^and this

i was going to buy an ssd, but i took that money to get a new case instead and i had change to buy another hard drive lol. The speed advantages are great, but in terms of price and capacity, they need to keep working on improving those two things! When that day comes, ssd's shall grace our pc's like manna from the heavens!

[Spazosaurus]

Fellas, right there with u. My 300gig vraptor cutting it quite nicely until that time comes.

[Saxito Pau]

Like is only me play 'chupid' and bought an SSD... but no regrets.... speed like WHOA...

[Spazosaurus]

Nah cant deny the sheer speed and low latency of ssd, just da price dan.

Suddenly I find my available 'play' funds becoming less and less so no longer will I buy juss because. Hadda be bess, but hadda be reasonable too.

[TriniXaeno]

I take my SSD for granted all the time, until I go to work and realize what a difference it makes in just about every little task.

Running an SSD alone probably won't make sense in a desktop due to its limited capacity.

Throw in a roomy 1.5tb mechnical drive and you have a winning combination.

Windows 7 OS sits on the 80GB SSD with a few key games where load times might really matter....other stuff like music, vids, old games, etc....sit on the 1.5tb.

That's what I do currently and it works like a charm.

Won't be practical to change that config until SSDs get very cheap and roomy. Say about 1tb for US$150.00. Then pure SSD will be the healing.

[Crixx_Creww]

Fellas, right there with u. My 300gig vraptor cutting it quite nicely until that time comes.

How does a vraptor compare to the momentus xt?

[Netizen1]

Fellas, right there with u. My 300gig vraptor cutting it quite nicely until that time comes.

Ent, raptor iwmc!

I have 2 x 160GB in RAID-0 and it's quite fine for now...

However, to satisfy that need for more space, I was eyeballing a couple 450GB VelociRaptors

[Arcmanov]

Fellas, right there with u. My 300gig vraptor cutting it quite nicely until that time comes.

How does a vraptor compare to the momentus xt?

This is actually a rather good question.

I've searched for proper comparisons online, but I cannot find any.
The only way to get that info is to test it yourself yes...if you could
get your hands on both.  I already have two v'raptors in raid-0.

Anybody willing to lend me a Momentus XT to do some serious testing? 

[Saxito Pau]

Well I had a Momentus XT for a while... until I sold it to Husk147.

Talk to Husk... I assure you he is quite happy with it.

And on a side note, I've heard a WD Caviar Black performs about as good as any velicoraptor... *zips up flame-retardant suit...*

[TriniXaeno]

I have 2 x 160GB in RAID-0 and it's quite fine for now...

However, to satisfy that need for more space, I was eyeballing a couple 450GB VelociRaptors

Why would you need more "fast" space?

Don't you have a cheap regular HD supplementing the raptors?

[Netizen1]

I do, but I'm not comfortable with such a small system drive... (~250GB) Windows 7 makes it worse by graphically displaying the drives utiliztion for you!

Maybe it's just e-greed or something on my part...

I guess I could always point the My Docs etc. to another drive, and that'd be fine  I'm a e-hoarder, sue me

[TriniXaeno]

The vast majority of our systems at work run with 80gb - 160gb drives

And as mentioned before, my main gaming pc at home has an 80gb OS drive

You have a whopping 250GB of blazing fast storage! And you want more? Yeah, e-greed sounds about right. lol

[Saxito Pau]

*reports Netizen's greed to his "accountant"...

[Crixx_Creww]

i have a momentus xt in my asus
was a god send, thinking of getting another one for the other laptop
but then the vraptor talk came up and i wanted to compare
does vraptor come in 2.5?

[Spazosaurus]

Its a 2.5 drive but comes in an 'ice block' which upconverts it to 3.5.

And no, its not detachable.

As for os partition size, as you guys know, over time, windows seems to eat hard drive space, that 'winsxs' folder in the windows directory seems to be the major culprit.

As an example, with about 5 games installed with all apps installed, I have just 100gigs free of 279 total. Using that kind of usage as a benchmark of my normal comfortable usage, if I have to get a ssd it must be at least a 256gig.

Averaging at around $450 to $500 us, I have to say f**k no. That shit hadda come down significantly before I consider one, especially as im pretty happy with my current drive.

[Saxito Pau]

 They do, but because they spin so fast and generate so much heat, they come with heatsink/3.5 in bracket to use in a desktop.

It won't last long if you try to stick that in a laptop... heat will probably kill it. The drive is apparently too thick to fit in a laptop anyway, the power draw is higher, and separating the the drive from the heatsink voids the warranty.

[TriniXaeno]

mechanical drives that spin so fast and generate so much heat must use a lot more power than the SSD.

Maybe the savings in electricity usage over a couple years may pay for the difference in cost?

You must have some REAL big games boy awesome to eat up all that space.

Also, the size of my windows folder is around 11gb, whats yours?

I heard that 64bit windows takes up a lot more space than 32bit windows. So maybe that's the difference.

Lets take a look at some numbers:

2 x Velociraptor 10,000rpm mechanical drives: US$240.00
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-VelociRaptor-Enterprise-WD1500HLFS/dp/B001EQQW1A/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1304253361&sr=1-3

1 OCZ Agility 160GB SSD: US$269.99
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-Agility-2-5-Inch-OCZSSD2-2AGT160G/dp/B004FLQF22/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1304253445&sr=1-5


For $29.99 more, you get extremely fast storage with no need for raid that's practically failure proof.

That some serious peace of mind. Knowing your data won't crash and burn while flying around at 10,000 rotations per minute.