Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen ;D First off let me introduce myself, I'm a long time lurker, and finally decided to create an account ^^ I am currently in the process of my first ever build! I have 90 percent of the parts for said build. However I need help picking an SSD to act as a main drive to install W7 on. It would need to be roughly 60GB, (this be should enough after reading various sources), however I am little confused as to whether it matters getting a Sata 1,2 or 3 drive. I have a 1TB F3 to act as main storage and I have heard that Sandforce controlled SSD's have some problems, and a few SSD's have to be updated to certain firmware to work properly etc. I just need a good solid SSD, that I can install windows on with out too much hassle, due to this being my first build. I would be ordering http://www.scan.co.uk/products/micro...tem-single-oem alongside it. And yes my case has adapters to fit an SSD Any help would be appreciated, and I hope to see many of you on the forums, with myself finally contributing to this establishment! Thank you for your time Arch
I'm in much the same boat, so I'm looking forwards to the answers here, but from my reading it looks like Crucial M4 SSDs are the way to go - although you may have to apply the latest firmware update, it does at least sound like that is a fairly straightforward procedure. Following the update the M4 line seems to offer the most 'bang-for-buck' as well as being pretty reliable by the sounds of things. If money allows I would be looking to push for a larger drive - I'm hoping to get at least a 128Gb and preferably a 256Gb one myself if I can stretch that far - it would be nice not just to restrict yourself to just nippy boot times!
You can't go wrong with Crucial, Kingston or Mushkin SSD's. I have a Corsair Force 3 SSD, and I have not had any problems with it in the 4 months I've had it (hopefully it stays that way ). People have been reporting issues with this particular SSD as well as with some OCZ SSD's. I feel that the problems lie with a minority (as in most cases) and they are just being blown out of proportion because of posts on forums/other websites. The users who have no problems with their hardware rarely ever post about how well their hardware has been working. If they did you would see a majority with no problems. There are big differences in SATA 1, 2 and 3 drives performance wise and it would be wise to get a SATA 3 drive if you want the best performance. Crucial SSD's seem to be the most reliable as I haven't really heard of any problems with them.
Like SleepyMatt said, the Crucial M4 is the way to go for an entry level SSD. The 64GB model is only £77 from Amazon or even better get it from dabs.com with some quidco/topcashback money! Then simply update the firmware to version 0009 if necessary. All the details can be found here... http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx Of course the Crucial M4 64GB is not the absolute best, but it's hard to argue against the performance for just £77! I'm typing this on a three year old laptop with SATA 1 connection and Corsair F40 SSD and it's much faster than any modern day desktop with the OS on a traditional hard drive!
I've got an Corsair Force F60 for Win7 and software and I'm quiet happy with it for the last year, allthough it's only an older SandForce 1200 drive running at SATA 300. The only thing that matters for the OS and software is read-speeds, so basically any SSD is sufficient and I wouldn't look too much at all those benchmarks regarding writing-speeds etc, as you don't write to your OS/software-drive too often anyways.
