Best Hard Drives & Best SSDs For Your Money: March 2010
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The Internals of a traditional hard drive and a SSD
The Best Hard Drives and Solid State Drives (SSD):
Most of you know well mechanical hard drives and it’s most probably what’s inside of your computer.
In the last few years and more and more as capacity increase and prices decrease, Solid State Drives are slowly but surely about to take over as the best choice for storage.
Solid State Drives have much lower latencies and higher transfer rates compared to mechanical hard drives and at this rate, will be the become the de facto choice for storage in computers in the near future.
Currently at a price of about $145 for 64GB of storage capacity, they are coming down in price quickly, but are still too expensive for the mainstream market at this point. However, if you’re interested in a solution that boots your OS much faster, loads your programs much faster and transfer data faster, you should take a look at SSDs.
For most of you, mechanical hard drives offers a lot of storage for a reasonable price/reasonable performance and remains the best choice. Hence why I’ll be covering both type of drives in this article, separated in two parts:
- Best Hard Drives For Your Money
- Best SSDs For Your Money
Part 1: The Best Hard Drives For Your Money
If you have the time, reading detailed hard drive reviews and specs are a lot of fun. However, most of us don’t have the time to do the research and just want the answers. In other words, what you want to know is what is the best hard drive within your budget.
So if you don’t have the time to do the research, or just don’t care to do it, don’t worry. I’ll come to your help with this guide of the Best Hard Drive for your money.
Best Hard Drive for ~$50:
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB
A standard SATA II 3.0Gb/s hard drive, that offers 500GB of storage, plenty enough to handle your video/music collection and all your games.
I went with Western Digital because their hard drive offers the highest reliability in my experience, being less prone to failure on average. The Blue Caviar series drives come with a 3 year warranty.
Best Hard Drive for ~$90:
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s
In Tom’s Hardware latest hard drive article, the SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB finishes on top of all transfer rates benchmarks, even ahead of what used to be my recommendation, the Western Digital Caviar Black. Considering that it’s faster and less expensive, there’s no reason for me to not recommend this drive from now on.
This drive offers 1TB (1000 GB) of storage, plenty enough to handle your video/music collection and all your games. This drive comes with 32MB of cache and a 3 years warranty.
Best Hard Drive for ~$110:
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB
With 1.5TB of storage for only $110, this is the sweet spot when it comes to price per GB, with a cost of ~0.07$ per GB.
This is a “green” drive, meaning that it’s not geared toward the best performance, but rather low power consumption and low noise. Mind you, it’s far from being a slow drive and will be just fine for the majority of you.
At $110 for 1.5TB, it’s perfect for anyone looking for a lot of space at a good price. Since it’s a “green” drive, it’s also good for a HTPC build.
Covered by a 3 years warranty.
Best Hard Drive for ~$180:
Two SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s
For $180, you can get two of my $90 recommendation, the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB hard drive. Add RAID 0 and you’ll get a very fast setup with 2TB of storage capacity, perfect for a build where performance is what matters most.
You can also choose to go with RAID 1 for data safety, where one of the two drives is an exact copy of the other. Note that you’ll only get half the capacity, 1TB in this case, with such a setup.
Covered by a 3 years warranty.
Alternative
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI 2TB
For $180, you can also choose this single Spinpoint F3EG 2TB drive. At 5400 rpm, it’s not a speed demon, but rather a “green” drive, meant for low power consumption and noise. An excellent choice if you need a lot of storage space for all your media.
Covered by a 3 years warranty.
Best Hard Drive for ~$280:
Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB
The Caviar Black series is the performance series from Western Digital, that comes with dual-processor on board as well at 64MB of cache.
If you’re looking for a fast, single-drive setup that can hold all your date, this is the way to go.
As usual, the Caviar Black series is covered with a 5 years warranty.
The Best Solid State Drives (SSD):
Solid state drives are the new hot thing in the computer world right now: Everyone see them superseding hard drives in the next few years as their capacity increase and their prices come down.
Right now, they are still expensive, still are quite a new technology and that means that you need to learn about them and shop for them.
Problem is, which brand and which model should you choose? This is where I come in.
So if you don’t have the time to do the research, or just don’t care to do it, don’t worry. I’ll come to your help with this guide of the Best SSD for your money.
A quick recap on what a SSD is:
You know those flash chips that are used in usb sticks and various memory cards? A SSD is basically several of those chips working in parallel with a controller to bring you higher speed.
There are many advantages to a SSD compared to a traditional spinning mechanical hard drive, such as:
- There are no noise, as there are no moving parts.
- Less heat emission compared to hard drives, as again, there are no moving parts.
- Lower power consumption, because you’ve guessed it, there are no moving parts, which results in longer battery life for laptops and mobile devices.
- SSD are much more resistant to shocks than hard drives are.
- Much lower latency (in the 0.07ms compared to 7-9ms).
- Higher transfer rates for reading (Up to 330 MB/s+) and writing files.
Of course, there are a few cons to SSDs as well. This is a new technology, so the cost per GB is much higher.
What about those reports of SSD slowing down over time?
They are true, but let me explain this quickly for you:
SSD are similar to hard drives in the way that they delete files: They don’t. They simply flag the files as deleted.
What’s the problem? With a hard drive, when you want to use the space occupied by the previous file, the hard drive would simply overwrite it. In the case of a SSD, it needs to erase the file to write again.
Until recently, SSD would delete the file right before writing the new one. Needless to say, this slows down write operations a lot, especially as your SSD gets filled up and you need to erase pretty much any previously deleted file to write new data.
TRIM
TRIM is here to change that through. What TRIM does is erase the file right away, allowing you to write at full speed without waiting to erase previously used space.
Now, to use TRIM, you need a OS that supports it, Windows 7 being the only one as far as I know, although OCZ, Intel and other companies offer software that enables a TRIM-like feature on Vista and XP. You also need a SSD that supports TRIM obviously.
Various drives now support TRIM. However note that no SSD setup supports TRIM in RAID at the moment.
If you want to learn more about SSDs, I highly recommend The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs article from Anandtech, a very complete and detailed article on SSD. A must read in my opinion.
With that said, let’s move on to my recommendations.
Keep in mind:
I’ll use this opportunity to remind you that this article is only a guideline for the prices I’ve seen on March 8th. You’re letting yourself down if you’re not looking for deals when you decide to purchase.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you read this list:
- Prices and availability change everyday. I can’t keep up with accurate pricing everyday, but I can suggest to you great SSD that you won’t regret buying at the price ranges that I list.
- This list is based on the best U.S. prices from NewEgg and Amazon. In other countries or in a retail stores, things might be different. All prices are based on new SSD prices.
Best SSD for $145:
Kingston 64GB 200(R)/110(W) MB/s 2.5″ SSD TRIM
A great drive for starters, with performance of up to 200MB/s read and up to 110MB/s write and a capacity of 64GB. TRIM is supported out of the box.
This kit comes with a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter as well as cloning software. It is backed up with a 3 years warranty from Kingston.
Best SSD for ~$250:
Kingston 128GB 200(R)/160(W) MB/s 2.5″ SSD TRIM
Offering performance of up to 200MB/s read and up to 160MB/s write and a capacity of 128GB.
With 128GB of storage for only $250, this is the sweet spot when it comes to price per GB for SSDs, with a cost of ~1.95$ per GB.
This kit comes with a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter as well as cloning software. It is backed up with a 3 years warranty from Kingston.
Best SSD for ~$500:
Two Kingston 128GB 200(R)/160(W) MB/s 2.5″ SSD TRIM for 256GB
If you want 256GB of storage with SSD technology for the lower price, your best bet right now is to get two of the Kingston 128GB drives that I just recommended above, which will set you back $500 ($250 x 2) for 256GB (128GB x 2)
Now, I recommend that you don’t enable RAID on these, as TRIM is unsupported with RAID at this point.
Each of these drives come with a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter as well as cloning software. They are backed up with a 3 years warranty from Kingston.
Best SSD for ~$720:
Kingston 256GB 230(R)/180(W) MB/s 2.5″ SSD TRIM
If you prefer to have a single 256GB SSD drive, this is the one that offers the best bang for buck. At $720, it offers performances up to 230MB/s in Read and up to 180MB/s in Write.
This kit comes an 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter as well as cloning software. It is backed up with a 3 years warranty from Kingston.
Conclusion
Regarding my recommendations of going with Kingston SSDs:
At this point, I’m sure that some of you will think that Kingston paid me to write this review of something. First of all, let me clarify this: No manufacturer has ever paid me or offered me any product, reward or any sort of advantage to write a review that favors them. I intend to keep it that way.
This review is based on my opinions only: At this point in time, here’s why I’m recommending Kingston SSDs:
- They offer TRIM support out of the box, without any firmware update, making SSDs a whole lot more user-friendly.
- While they don’t THE best performance for SSDs (Read more about performance in these benchmarks from AnandTech), in my opinion they offer the best features (TRIM support out of the box, very respectable performance that will outclass any mechanical hard drive) at a relative low cost for SSDs.
This is why I recommend the Kingston SSDs. In my opinion, they are currently the best offer if you’re looking into buying your first SSD, whether it’s meant as an upgrade to a system or a new boot drive for a new system.
It’s with pleasure that I complete this edition of the Best Hard Drives/SSDs for your money. I hope that it was useful to you.
Upcoming Updates:
In March, you can expect to updates to the lower end Gaming PCs, all of the Workstation Builds, as well as all of the HTPCs Builds. I’m also planning a few updates to our popular Best PC Parts articles, where I point out which parts offers the best performance for a given price or the best value.
For more details on what is coming up in March, read the following article: Recap of February and the Schedule of March 2010.
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