I'm about to build some systems for office use. The users are very demanding and having a fast Windows experience is a must. However, speed is not to be attained at any cost. While the Corsair Force 60GB SSD drive is more expensive than a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3, will the difference between the two be obvious to an office user?
Yes you will see the difference, Micromart has a good article on it this week. Or one of these may be a good compromise: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=1894
I think the issues have been cleared up between some Sandforce-based drives and motherboards, but it'd be better to check beforehand. The main issues were the power-saving features of the drive and the inability of some Gigabyte motherboards to handle them, causing the PC to freeze up. Bios and firmware updates seem to have ironed out a lot of the problems though. Whether it was because the F60 is more popular, but it seemed to be the main drive to have these problems. Tbh, it's why I went for the same but different drive from OCZ, the Vertex 2E. OCZ seem to support their drives a lot better. Going from a hdd to any ssd is quite amazing. Booting up in 30 seconds or so, desktop ready straight away, apps launching in mere seconds.
I've had Force 120 for couple of months, and tbh it's probably the best single hardware upgrade I've done in my life. Everything is way is just quicker and more responsive, plain and simple. Definitely worth it.
Thank you for your answers. The problem is that the SSD offers around here are not that diverse. The only ones that seem to be imported and fit the budget are the Intel X-25 M 80GB, Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB and the Corsair Force Series. Out of these three, I found the Corsairs to be the fastest in reviews and benchmarks. Which would you recommend?
I would personally go for the Intel as it's cheaper and has great read speeds. Remember Sandforce performance varies depending on the type of file whereas Intel's drives are consistent.
Sandforce drives also have lots of stupid issues although most have been fixed in the latest firmware. I've got a Force 120, go with Intel.