Plextor PX-M3P 256GB
Probably better known its range of top notch optical drives, Plextor also has a range of SSDs that are constantly evolving. The latest drives to hit the shelves are the Pro versions of the M3 series. Just like the standard M3, the Pro version uses 24nm Toshiba Toggle NAND, 512MB of cache and a Marvell 88SS9174 controller – the BLD2 version.
The Marvell controller, plus the updated firmware the Pro uses, gives it improved performance over the standard M3 version. Indeed its read/write figures ranks among some of the best on test. If it were a tad cheaper it would have earned Ed's Choice. Included is a mounting bracket, disk cloning and backup software plus a confidence boosting 5 year warranty.
Reg Rating 85%
Price £265
More info Plextor
Samsung SSD830 240GB
Samsung first reminded everybody it knew a little something about producing SSDs with the 430 series. Yet it really made an impression in the performance market with its next release, the SSD830 series. Samsung’s SSD830 series is unique amongst this group of drives as it’s the only one in the line-up that doesn’t feature a SandForce or Marvell controller but instead uses one of Samsung’s own designs.
After all, if you’re the largest memory chip maker on the planet, you don’t need to waste money getting some other company to design you a controller. In fact, all the internals of the drive; controller, cache and 20nm MLC NAND are Samsung products. With the best read speed of the SATA drives on test, you can be certain that Samsung will be tuning up its SSDs even more going forward, to get write speeds to match.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £240
More info Samsung
Next page: SanDisk Extreme 240GB
COMMENTS
Lies, Damn Lies, and Bad Benchmarks
I am appallingly disappointed. I would have thought that everybody with a grain of understanding would by now know that sequential I/O tests are meaningless and that random read/write (especially write on SSDs) IOPS are the only meaningful figure for assessing the performance of disks. This should be done with write caching disabled, and the amount of data written in such tests should be at least 512MB of 10x the amount of cache on the disk, whichever is greater (to avoid the disk faking it by lying about commits - which incidentally some SSDs even from reputable manufacturers do with write-caching enabled).
And yet we only get sequential read/write performance figures for these disks.
The second most important figure for a lot of SSDs is power usage. This has also not been measured, nor even the manufacturers' (usually highly questionable) figures provided.
Can this technical oversight please be corrected so that the review is actually meaningful?
And tape drive £/Gb are far cheaper still so clearly that's the way to go.
"You can be certain that Samsung will be tuning up its SSDs even more going forward,"
Is that the same as in the future?
The calorifica value of a GB.
Well AC, if your criterion is £ per GB then SSDs will probably never fit the bill. However, what you've chosen is the equivalent of how many calories can I buy for my £. As such, you are clearly going to be basing your diet based on the products of Greggs (or Taco Bell if you are a citizen of the US). That's wonderful if all you do is low-value, manual labour but some do more interesting things.
For those with more discerning tastes, who value their own time and the responsiveness of systems, well we will value something more than just how many calories we can buy. There's a bit more to a storage than how many GB I can have.
Dont ignore the older drives.
If you just want a cheap but roomy enough upgrade for an older laptop then the older SATA2 Sandisk Ultra 120GB that are going for around £65 are worth a look.
Still three times faster then the HDD you have in there at the mo. Made quite a difference to my old laptop.
