Suggestions for a SSD

[lilshawn]

My drive in my computer is starting to show signs of aging. I'm thinking of diving into the solid state drive territory.


I'm not overly concerned about space I have lots of that on 4 other drives. I'm looking to boost performance but i'm also looking for something reliable and something that has a decent warranty. Lot's of drive are teeing 1.5 million+ MTBF but we all know that's bull plop. trying to decipher reviews for all these drive and they are all over the place. Some say this one is good and someone else says no.


Western Digital has 5 year warranty on their drives which I like but they also want $549.00 for 128GB    where as other brands OCZ/Crucial/Kingston are all in the 99-125 range


I guess basically i'm looking for


- something in the 200 gb range
- SATAIII
-  that still performs great
- reliable
- has a decent enough (no hassle) warranty.


can anybody offer suggestions or comments on OCZ/Crucial/Kingston drives?

[MonMotha]

I have an Intel 520 series.  Easily saturates the lowly SATA 3Gbps interface in my laptop with basically any workload I throw at it.  Intel claims >500MB/sec performance both read and write (using SATA 6Gbps, obviously), and many people claim it does generally hit the 400+ mark on real-world workloads.

Intel's reliability is generally noted to be among the better.  Everybody seems to be able to point to a horror story from every manufacturer, but I've honestly heard fewer about Intel's, even considering an older model with (now) known flaws.  Intel provides a 5 year warranty, though it won't cover data loss (pretty much nothing does).  You should always have backups, of course, for any drive.

They ain't cheap, though.  A 240GB cost me ~$330 approx. 4 months ago.  Still way cheaper than that Western Digital.  I have no idea why that's so expensive unless they're claiming drastically better performance than basically everything else on the market (which is already constrained by SATA 6Gbps in many cases).

As a comment, it does suck that SSD reliability just isn't up there.  The hardware reliability should be a fair bit better than revolving metal, but apparently the software is hard to get right.  As an embedded developer I'm mixed on this.  On one hand, they should test their firmware better, but on the other hand, I'm well aware of how complicated the little things like this can get.

[lilshawn]

my local retailer has the intel 520 series 240gb KIT (brackets etc) for $279.99 and they match prices so i'll poke around and see if anybody has it on sale.