Check Out the Best SSDs of 2014: A Buyer’s Guide

Check Out the Best SSDs of 2014: A Buyer's Guide

A buyer's guide has been released by the Extreme Tech to provide readers some information that they should know about the Best SSDs of 2014. If you have bought a small SSD back in 2008 to 2010 and wants some upgrade and one of the first time and are looking for basic ones, then you should read on to know more.

If you're a consumer who wants a high-capacity drive with high performance and you're comfortable applying a drive firmware patches, then a Samsung 840 Evo is for you. Buy one that is not lesser than 256GB for about $135 at Dell unless you're absolutely sure you won't need it. If you don't want TLC NAND (more on what TLC is later) but you do want a cheap high-capacity drive that doesn't skimp on performance, Crucial's M550 1TB in Amazon is a good alternative.

In buying SSD, you should be aware that performance can vary significantly between drive families - the 840 Evo 1TB and M550 1TB are roughly the same speed, but the 840 Evo 256GB is much faster than the M550 256GB. Sooner or later, if you decided the highest performing drive money can buy today, buy a Samsung 850 Evo.

The cheapest SSDs are now close to 40 cents per gigabyte, while expensive high-performance drives are hitting around $1.

Back in the dawn of the SSD era, it wasn't unusual to find test cases (typically random read/writes) where certain SSDs would fall off a proverbial cliff. In severe cases, SSDs might even lag traditional mechanical hard drives. The SATA 6G interface that first debuted in 2010 is largely tapped even modest drives are capable of saturating its 600MB/s (in practice, more like 550MB/s) in at least some tests. This is one reason why the manufacturer specs on two drives can be so similar, even when they perform quite differently in real-world tests.

One critical factor to keep in mind in buying a modern SSD is that capacity and performance are often linked but the size and significance of that link varies greatly. A chart from a review released by Tech Report for Adata SP610 illustrates this.

The Crucial's M500 drive at 240GB is the slowest drive in TR's data set. At 480GB, the same M500 family is nearly 60% faster. The M500 960GB variant is 11% faster yet, with the lowest overall price per GB.

The M500 960GB is approximately 1.8x faster than the M500 240GB across Tech Report's entire benchmark suite.

Now, contrast that against the 840 Evo family. While there's still a gap between top and bottom, the 250GB Evo ranks in at 800% of standard HDD speed, the 500GB drive is around 940%, and the 840 Evo is around 980%. The gap between the top and bottom products is perhaps 20% as opposed to 80%.

Now that you have an idea on this year's SSDs, choose wisely in buying SSD. Make sure it will suit your needs and your budget of course.

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