Hi all, Firstly is there much difference (apart from capacity) between 256 GB and 512 GB versions of the same SSD in terms of speed or otherwise. Considering that value for money is more important for me than straight out speed. If you had to buy a 256 GB SSD today what would you buy? If you had to buy a 512 GB SSD today what would you buy? Thanks for any input.
Samsung 830 (if you can find one), Samsung 840 pro, ocz vector or ocz vertex 4! I would go with 256gb ssd and 1tb Seagate barracuda or caviar blue drive. That way you get the best of both and 256gb is plenty for os, progam files and many games!
tbh if i were buying now i'd go for one of the SK hynix ones, they look great and are priced very low i think all recently released SSDs are 'fast enough' and 'reliable enough' now, it's not like the early days of the tech though in my current pc i have both a samsung 830 (256gb, steam folder) and a crucial m4 (64gb, OS). both work fine
I currently have a Corsair C300 64GB as my OS drive (which is very full with a few games on it). and a 640gb WD Blue hdd which is 300gb full of pretty much just steam and origin games. That said I have virtually every game I own in steam installed which is clearly not needed so a 512gb should give me space to have the common installed. Tempted to save a the pounds and go for a 256gb and just leave my least used games on the WD now steam supports installing to different drives.
Atm, the 240/256 & 480/512GB models of any particular drive generally perform around the same - though, on average data rates using r.l. data sizes, the smaller ones are normally slightly faster. The one main exception to this that i can think of is the upcoming Crucial M500 - where the 480 is noticeably faster than the 240 - though this trend is likely to continue as more SSDs start to use 128Gb nand dies, which reduces the parallelisation within the SSD... Simply put, internally, non-SandForce SSDs act in R0 (a number of nand dies over a number of channels) - whilst SF's act in R5 (there's a nand die put aside so it can recover from an entire die failing) - so doubling the nand die size from 64Gb to 128Gb reduces the no of dies. Whilst not strictly linear with the jump to 128Gb dies (as both nand & controller improvements will also affect things), using 64Gb dies, this is illustrated by 240/256GB models being much faster than the current equivalent 120/128GB ones. As to which SSD to get - personally i now use Samsungs - 2x 256GB 830s (in R0) in this machine, & 2x 256GB 840 Pros (in R0) in the proper one... ...both arrays being heavily under partitioned... ...though the Vector & Vertex4 are both great drives. Personally, i'm not a fan of the Crucial's for an OS drive for a high end system - however, assuming the price point of the 480GB M500 is as competitively priced as it 'should' be (based on the 960GB being less than £450 there's no reason why it shouldn't be, but who knows?), this provisionally looks as though it could be a very decent buy as the controller has a reasonable amount going for it... Well, the 256GB Plextor M5 Pro uses the same controller with 64Gb nand dies & is somewhere around the 830 & Vertex 4 in r.l. performance - so it 'should' be a good buy if the price is right.
