Best Hard Drives and Best SSDs for Your Money: Holidays 2009

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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 $200 for 60-64GB of storage capacity, they 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:

1. Best Hard Drives For Your Money
2. 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 drives for your money.

Best Hard Drive for ~$50: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB

Covered by Western Digital’s 3 years warranty for the Caviar Blue Series, SATA II interface and 500GB of storage capacity.

Best Hard Drive for ~$75: Western Digital 750 GB Caviar Black

Covered by Western Digital’s 5 years warranty for the Caviar Black Series, SATA II interface and 750GB of storage capacity.

Alternative:
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB 5400 RPM

This is a “green” hard drives, meaning that its power consumption is lower, thanks to a lower spinning speed. Perfect for external hard drives and drives used for backup or storage purposes. Here you get 1TB of storage and 3 years warranty from Samsung.

Best Hard Drive for ~$100: Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB

Covered by Wester Digital’s 5 years warranty for the Caviar Black Series, SATA II interface and 1TB of storage capacity.

Alternatives:
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB 5400 RPM

Like before, this is a “green” series hard drive, with lower power consumption and slower spinning speed. Here you get 1.5TB of storage and 3 years warranty from Samsung.

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:

1. There are no noise, as there are no moving parts
2. Virtually no heat emission, as again, there are no moving parts
3. Lower power consumption, because you’ve guessed it, there are no moving parts, which results in longer battery life for laptops and mobile devices.
4. SSD are much more resistant to shocks than hard drives are.
5. Much lower latency (in the 0.07ms compared to 7-9ms).
6. Higher transfer rates for reading (Up to 270 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/will offer software that will enable TRIM on Vista and XP. You also need a SSD that supports TRIM obviously.

The newest Intel, OCZ and Crucial SSDs support TRIM, although a firmware upgrade may be required. Other companies such as Corsair will offer it shortly, via firmware upgrade as well.

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 December 7th. 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.
• SSD are based on a 2.5″ form factor, so you will need an adapter to make it fit in the usual 3.5″ hard drive slot for desktops.
  Here’s my recommendation: ICY DOCK 2.5″ to 3.5″ SSD & SATA Hard Drive Converter

Best SSD for $130 : Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB

A great drive for starters, with performance of up to 170MB/s read and up to 40MB/s write and a capacity of 40GB.

Best SSD for ~$170: OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB

Offering performance of up to 240MB/s read and up to 145MB/s write and a capacity of 30GB. Being an OCZ drive, it features an Indilinx controller and TRIM support out of the box.

Alternative: Corsair Extreme Series 32GB

While it doesn’t support TRIM yet, it will in the future with a firmware upgrade and offers a 32GB capacity for $20 less, at $150. Speeds of 220MB/s read and up to 135MB/s.

Best SSD for ~$250: OCZ Agility Series 60GB

The best 60GB drive from OCZ in my opinion. It’s nearly as fast as the other 60GB models from OCZ, but it costs less, making it a very interesting drive in the $250 price range. Comes with TRIM support and features an Indilinx controller as well. You can expect speeds of 230 MB/s read and 135MB/s write.

Alternative: Corsair 64GB

While it doesn’t support TRIM yet, it will in the future with a firmware upgrade and offers a 64GB capacity for $40 less, at $210. Speeds of 220MB/s read and up to 135MB/s.

Best SSD for ~$300: Intel X25-M 80GB

Intel is the way to go with the fastest read speeds (250 MB/s) read, but is slower for write, at 70MB/s.

Best SSD for ~$380: OCZ Agility Series 120GB

Offering performance of up to 230MB/s read and up to 135MB/s write and a capacity of 120GB. Being an OCZ drive, it features an Indilinx controller and TRIM support out of the box.

Best SSD for $550: Intel X25-M 160GB

Once again, Intel is the way to go with the fastest read speeds (250 MB/s) read, but is slower for write, at 70MB/s.

Best SSD for ~$750: Corsair 256GB

This is the best deal that you’ll get on a 256GB SSD right now. Featuring speeds of 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write, this drive is blazing fast.

However, as this is a Corsair drive, it does not support TRIM yet, as stated above, it will after a firmware update that should come out soon.

Best SSD above $750: None

Beyond this point, there are simply no interesting SSD, not to mention that the price is getting ridiculously high. OCZ has announced 512GB and 1TB SSD but as you can imagine, they will be extremely expensive at first.

Conclusion

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. I also invite to subscribe for free to Hardware Revolution’s articles right below, to automatically receive our latest articles via E-mail or RSS.