SSD shootout: pricey HDD replacements do battle

Considering that solid state discs -- although still noticeably more expensive that traditional HDDs -- are quickly plummeting in price, it's about time a brief roundup was executed in order to pinpoint which SSD was best for you. Granted, CustomPC's evaluation only included a handful of options, but the in-depth testing process found a few glaring losers and even fewer runaway winners. As expected, reviewers used a number of read / write testing applications to judge the speed differences and real-world performance increases on seven SSDs ranging from 8GB to 32GB in size. Coming out on top was Samsung's 32GB drive, which proved both "quick and silent" in their testing; however, the 18GB STEC Zeus-IOPS proved the hands-down winner in terms of sheer speed. 'Course, we highly doubt many of you will be snagging the latter after witnessing its £7,050 ($14,461) pricetag, but a number of slightly slower performers including PQI's Turbo Plus 2.5 could very well provide the boost you desire without (totally) breaking the bank.

[Homeboy @ Jul 24th 2007 4:50PM]

Huh!? So samsungs 32GB drive is both "quick and silent"? I thought all SSDs were silent.

[anonymous @ Jul 24th 2007 5:38PM]

I was just thinking the same thing. what makes it noisy? does it actually use a HDD or fan?

[Ricky @ Jul 24th 2007 6:50PM]

I think it is more of a marketing term to users unfamiliar with SSDs. Everyone who understands SSDs already know it will be quicker and silent when compared to HDDs.

[modeless @ Jul 24th 2007 7:30PM]

They tested some RAM drives with cooling fans, in addition to the Flash ones.

[John Doe @ Jul 24th 2007 11:40PM]

The electricity flowing through some of these drives is noisier on some models then others. If you look at the back of these SSD's you will see little capacitors on the back. These are "speed bumps" for the electricity. (Its a way for the manufacture to sell faster model in the future by removing them later.) What you want to do, and this applies to hard drives as well, is take a needle nose pliers and rip those little things off the board. This will allow the electricity to flow freely through the board. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the review didn't touch on this. Probably have to return the drives back to the manufacturers.
If anyone tries this please response to this post with before and after benchmarks. I think we would all be interested in your "findings".

[Tyk @ Jul 24th 2007 4:55PM]

I just ordered a VAIO TZ with the 32gb ssd and optical drive combo... i want ssd now. Im gonna use SD cards to hold my working files since they are so cheap nowadays.

[AlexP @ Jul 24th 2007 6:56PM]

You fail at economics.

Get yourself a (few) portable drive(s), jeesh.

[John Doe @ Jul 24th 2007 11:23PM]

We'll ignore then fact for a second that in Tyk's post he didn't mention word one of caring about price. I own an external FW800 SATA 160GB drive. Its great. Its also a PITA to carry around. You have NO idea as to why he would want this. Its obvious he wants something ultra portable what with him ordering a laptop that weighs in at less then 3 lbs. Flash or SD cards are more then enough.

He may fail at economics. You failed at reading AND common sense.

[Peter @ Jul 24th 2007 5:39PM]

I just bought a Dell Latitude D830 and it came with an external SATA port. The rep I talked to claimed laptops are going to SSD drives for the OS and smaller amounts of data, and that you would use the external SATA drive for the bulk of your data.

[a ham sandwich @ Jul 24th 2007 8:50PM]

lol you get your advice from a dell rep

[strider_mt2k @ Jul 24th 2007 11:20PM]

He's kinda gotcha there dude.

-and he's a sandwich.

[John Doe @ Jul 24th 2007 11:31PM]

I'm sorry to say the Dell rep is an idiot. One thing you need to learn about reps from ANY company is they throw their opinion into the mix. Which is why its amusing as hell to watch people on Apple boards post "HEY I heard from this Apple rep that Apple is moving to all fuel cell in '08!!!!"

These reps don't know jack shit. Period. As for the concept that everything is moving externally. Its is an exceptionally bad idea. External devices == more shit to keep track of, more weight to deal with, more cables to manage, and something to get lost and/or bounced around until the drive dies.
The rep is simply stating his opinion which in this case is laughably wrong. Until SSD's increase their capacity to 100GB+ and speeds that at least rival 5400 RPM drives these drives will simply be used in business class laptops.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Jul 24th 2007 10:57PM]

Where they went wrong in this review was they forgot to benchmark the king of SSDs: RAM-SAN from Texas Memory Systems, it can produce over 24 GB/s (24,000 MB/s) and 3,200,000 IO per second.
http://www.texmemsys.com/

[John Doe @ Jul 24th 2007 11:18PM]

Meh. Wake me when

A: Laptops can have both SSD and larger HD (For media storage.) with the SSD having the OS, and benchmarks show real performance increases over traditional drives.

B: SSD's get into the 150-200GB range, doesn't cost your first born child to own, and has read/write speeds as fast as traditional 7200 drives.

right now this is great for business users who carry mission critical data on their laptops, but for the rest of us who have a metric crap ton of data...not so exciting.

[Teddy @ Jul 27th 2007 1:15AM]

I wonder when auto manufacturers will start using SSDs for media storage in their vehicles (music, navigation maps, etc).

[xl8 @ Jul 28th 2007 7:31PM]

flash is nice but flash drives are not fast enough for gamer rigs, game rigs need ramdrives that can do at least 150MB/S data transfers, game workloads are usually over 100MB/S and that makes any gaming on a sata drive stutter, sata topping out at 40MB/s
when flash starts Popping out flash SSDs that can do 150MB/S data transders in a 32GB size, then it ill be hot.

[Sky @ Aug 3rd 2007 5:20PM]

Does anyone know where to buy a 2GB SSD online? Not a flash stick but a drive.