Best Solid State Drives

Value is best defined by the price per gigabyte in a storage device. With a 128GB capacity and a $130 price tag after rebates, the OCZ Octane is very close to the $1 per gigabyte rate making it extremely affordable. This drive is the first to use the Indilinx Everest controller. Initial performance falls below what can be achieved by the popular Sandforce with burst read speeds of 470MB/s and writes of 210MB/s and fewer iOPS. Still, the performance is decent enough for most drives in this capacity range. If you want a bit higher capacity, then the OCZ Agility 3 240GB drive at $250 after rebates is the best value that once again is close to the $1/GB pricing. It also offers faster overall performance thanks to its capacity and controller.

Solid state drives are touted for their reliability over traditional hard drives but the technology is still quite new. Memory chip failures and firmware problems are just some of the things users can encounter that might cause their drive to fail. Of all the manufacturers, Intel has the most rigorous testing that give them the lowest return rate of solid state drives in the industry. The new Intel 520 series drives might use the Sandforce controllers found on many SSD drives but it has a custom firmware that was developed between the two companies. This gives Intel a big advantage from their experience and their chips to offer a high performance drive that also should have some of the highest reliability. It uses a SATA III interface for possible burst read and write rates of 550 and 500 MB/s but it will likely perform closer to around 300 MB/s. Pricing is a bit higher around $250 because of Intel's name. If you want an all Intel solution including the controller but are willing to sacrifice a bit in terms of performance, than the Intel 320 120GB at $200 is an suitable alternative.

Performance in solid state drives are reliant upon the memory chips, the drive controller and what interface version it uses. The highest performance drives now require that the systems have a SATA III or 6.0 Gbps interface on the computer and drive. If you want some very solid performance without breaking the bank, than the Samsung Series 830 256GB drive offers a good balance between performance and price. It certainly is more affordable than Intel's 520 series drive which offers the best total performance. Burst read speeds reach up to 520MB/s while write speeds are a bit slower at 400MB/s but iOPS are very high. Pricing is reasonable at roughly $400. If you must have the fastest and aren't as concerned with pricing, then the Intel 520 240GB is tops but at a very pricey $540.

If price isn't really an object and you want the largest drive possible, Intel 320 Series offers a very large 600GB. Priced around $1100, it isn't the most expensive drive on the market but it does certainly come close. Write performance is higher than the smaller capacity versions of the 320 series around 220MB/s and reads top out around 270MB/s. If you want a bit higher performance with a SATA III interface, then the Crucial M4 512MB has much higher read performance with roughly the same write performance but with a more affordable $700 price.