Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up [PC]

Sep 9th 2010
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Budget Sub-0 Solid State Drive Round-up [PC] High prices are always a stumbling block to new tech adoption and with SSDs it hasn’t been any different.

We’ve come a ways from first generation drives that suffered from severe slowdowns, but solid state drives are still faraway from replacing traditional storage and it really is easily explained by comparing cost per gigabyte.

Recently there has been a surging demand for drives that sacrifice space for speed and cheaper price tags, and manufacturers had been racing to deliver just that. The most affordable offering in our last round-up over a year ago came from OCZ. Priced at $270, the OCZ Agility 120GB cost almost twice the $150 limit we’ve got imposed on the SSDs featured in this text.

With that price cap we’ve been ready to include more than half a dozen drives using controllers from the likes of JMicron, Intel , Toshiba, SandForce and Indilinx. But while there is very a little diversity within the controllers used by these affordable SSDs, like we mentioned before there is additionally something most of them have in common, a more limited storage capacity.

Budget Sub-0 Solid State Drive Round-up [PC]

Most of the drives featured in this round-up offer 32GB – 40GB capacities, while a number of others top out at 64GB. As limiting as a 32GB drive might appear, they’re able to still be extremely useful in enhancing a PC’s performance when set to run as the boot drive. These smaller drives may additionally accommodate for select programs where they are able to greatly speed up using the application , as an illustration, Adobe Photoshop.

Gamers are likely going to need a minimum of a 64GB drive considering many titles weigh in at more than 8GB at the present time. Thankfully, we were ready to find a number of good options that supply one of these storage capacity for under $150.

Today’s round-up is comprised of right here contenders: OCZ Agility 2 40GB ($135), OCZ Vertex 2 40GB ($124), OCZ Onyx 64GB ($130), OCZ Onyx 32GB ($85), ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB ($83), Intel X25-V 40GB ($100), and the Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB ($125). Along with these affordable SSD offerings we’ve got added to the mixture the Seagate Momentus XT ($135), a highly-touted hybrid drive that attempts to deliver the proper of both worlds by offering huge storage capacity at an inexpensive price, with the added performance boost of NAND flash memory for caching data.

We’ll be putting each drive through a suite of tests including four synthetic benchmark programs plus our own file copying and load time tests.

Benchmarks: Real-World Applications

The Windows 7 boot time test begins from the moment the initial loading screen appears to the time the Windows desktop is fully loaded. As you will see that all SSDs perform exceptionally well here and surprisingly there is intensely little difference between them.

The Intel X25-V 40GB could be the fastest drive taking a normal of just 11.7 seconds to load a clean copy of Windows 7. A better fastest drive was the ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB which scored poorly in a number of our write tests on the previous page.

The OCZ Vertex 2 and Agility 2 40GB drives delivered similar performance to that of the S596 Turbo 32GB while the Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB and OCZ Onyx 32/64GB drives were only slightly slower.

The Momentus XT does bridge the space between HDD and SSD performance with a load time of 17.8 seconds. Although it’s 27% slower than the worst performing SSD that we tested it’s miles a huge 36% faster than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB harddisk which took 28 seconds to load Windows 7.

For the applying load test we load here applications into the Windows 7 startup: Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007, Word 2007 and Photoshop CS4. The test starts when the Windows 7 startup sound loads to the time the overall application is loaded.

This is where SSD technology really shines and we see this with all drives taking just 5 to 7 seconds to finish the complete task. Interestingly, it was the ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB and Onyx 32/64GB the single drives to crack the 6 second barrier. However with close results on all three runs it’s difficult to establish a definitive winner. Let’s just say SSD technology wins here.

We were surprised to peer that the Momentus XT 500GB was slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB harddisk in this test. Taking 32 seconds to load all eight applications right now is pretty slow going, particularly when a traditional desktop hard disk did it in 26 seconds.

This test measures the time it takes to load Adobe Photoshop CS4 from the time we click on the icon to the time the program is totally loaded and able to use. On a normal budget SSD this takes roughly 2 seconds. The ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB was again the fastest SSD tested clocking a typical time of just 1.9 seconds.

The Intel X25-V 40GB was the slowest taking 2.8 seconds on average. Still none of the seven drives test is going to permit you to make coffee once you wait.

Although the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB struggled with our previous application loading test it seems that that this drive is incredibly snappy when loading a single application as it delivered SSD-like performance.

This next batch of results was recorded when loading the last level from the one campaign in StarCraft II. The test began the second the weight screen appeared and was stopped once the ” click to play” message appeared.

Using a 3.5″ desktop harddisk the game takes on average around 24 seconds to load this level. The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB was much slower loading the level in 39 seconds. By comparison the slowest SSD tested was the OCZ Onyx 32GB which took 23 seconds followed by the Intel X25-V 40Gb which took 22 seconds.

The fastest SSD test was the OCZ Vertex 2 40GB which completed the test in 18.7 seconds making it a fraction faster than the Agility 2 40GB and ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB drives.

Check out the remaining of the object below.