The Kingston HyperX SSD, the fastest 2.5" SSD available on the market right now, is recommended, in its 120GB model, as the best $215 SSD. With a $60 Mail-in Rebate, you can get it for as little as $155!

The Best SSDs and HDDs For Your Money?

By that, I mean the drives that offer the best performance, reliability and/or most capacity at a given price.

Why would you want that?
Because you want the best bang for the buck, the best possible drive for your hard-earned money and the highest performance, reliability and capacity possible!

If you have the time…

Reading SSDs/HDDs reviews are a lot of fun. However, most of us don’t have the time to do the research and just want to know the best option for our budget.

This is where this article comes in, by recommending to you the best SSDs and the best hard drives for your money, at various price points.

Keep in mind:
1. This list is based on the best U.S. prices from NewEgg and/or Amazon that I’ve seen as of February 1st. Prices and availability change everyday. I can’t keep up with accurate pricing everyday, but I can suggest to you great drives that you won’t regret buying at the price ranges that I list.
2. All prices are based on new drives prices, no used or open box drives are listed; they might be a good deal but come with trade offs such as limited return policy, limited warranty, etc.

This article is in four parts:

1. The Best Solid State Drives (SSDs) For Your Money
2. The Best Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) For Your Money
3. RAID 0,1,5 and 10: A quick and easy summary
4. Conclusion and future SSDs/HDDs.

The Best SSDs For Your Money:

SSD FAQ:

If you wondering “Who are SSDs for?”, if you want a quick recap on what a SSD is, wonder about reports of SSDs slowing down over time or want to learn more about TRIM and/or TRIM with RAID, I invite you to read our SSD FAQ.

February Update:

SSDs Prices:

- Corsair: Mostly up, except for Force 3 60GB which is down $5 and the Force GT 480GB, which went up by about $80, which is why I don’t recommend it at its current price ($907).
- Crucial: The M4 series SSDs all went down quite a bit in price compared to last month and are all terrific deals considering their high reliability.
- Intel: Mostly unchanged.
- Kingston HyperX: Both the 120GB and 240GB are down in price compared to last month and both are elligiable for $60 Mail-in Rebates. They are great deals if you want one of the fastest SSD currently available on the market.
- Mushkin: No major price changes, some models went slightly up in price, some went slightly down in price.
- OCZ: Now that the first wave of customer reviews are in, I no longer recommend the OCZ Petrol for now. While its price per GB is outstanding, it appears to offer poor reliability. The OCZ Vertex Plus 240GB SSD is no longer recommended for the same reason: poor reliability. The Vertex 3 90GB is priced $35 more than last month and is not price competitive at its current price point. Same goes for the RevoDrive 3 120GB, which went up $100 in price compared to last month.
- Patriot Torqx 2 32GB: It got a $10 price cut and it’s now an even less expensive entry-level SSD.
- Plextor M3: The 128GB model is $30 more than last month and is no longer recommended due to its price. The 256GB model is down $35 though and is a great deal for a reliable 256GB SSD with a 5 years warranty.
- Samsung 830 series: The 128GB and 256GB models went up by $5, the 64GB model costs the same as last month. The 512GB model is out of stock and will remain so for a while it would seem.

The SSD Comparative Table:

The SSD comparative table allows you to quickly compare SSDs based on capacity, performance, reliability, price per GB and price, which allows you to figure out which SSD is the best one for your needs.

1. Ratings are calculated based on website reviews, the wonderful AnandTech’s SSD Tool, failure rates published by Marc Prieur on hardware.fr, customer reviews and specifications. These are estimates, but at worse, they shouldn’t be off by more than one point.
2. Read performance weights for ~60% of the performance rating and write performance for ~40% of it, seeing as the average user’s SSD will experience much more reads when loading the OS/programs/games/various data. compared to writes when installing programs/games/working, saving data and the like.
3. Note that performance ratings are only comparable for similar capacity. That is, a “7″ 64GB SSD offers similar performance to another “7″ 64GB SSD, but not to a “7″ 128GB SSD. Generally, when comparing SSDs within the same line-up, higher capacity SSDs offer higher performance than smaller capacity SSDs.
4. Only SSDs with a competitive Performance, Reliability and/or Price (or $/GB) are included in this comparative table. If a SSD isn’t this comparative table, it’s simply because its performance/reliability is lower or its price is higher than the competition.
5. Performance and reliability scores are not related.
6. P: Performance, R: Reliability: On a scale from 1 to 10, higher is better. “~” are used to indicate estimates and “?” are used for scarce data. W: Warranty: In years
7. You’ll find in Bold: Performance of 8+, Reliability of 9+, Warranties of 5 years and a price per GB of $1.50/GB or lower.

Brand	Model	GB	P	R	W	$ per GB	Price
Corsair	Force Force 3 Force GT Force GT Force 3 Force GT Force 3 Force GT Force GT Force 3 Force GT	40GB 60GB 60GB 90GB 120GB 120GB 180GB 180GB 240GB 480GB 480GB	5 8.3 9 9 8.3 9 8.3 9 9 8.3 9	8 8 7 10 7 8 8 10 8 7-8? 8-9?	3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs	$2.13/GB $1.59/GB $1.83/GB $1.78/GB $1.42/GB $1.58/GB $1.39/GB $1.50/GB $1.65/GB $1.42/GB $1.88/GB	$85 $95 $110 $160 $170 $190 $250 $270 $397 $680 $904
Crucial	M4 M4 (7mm thick) C300 (Micro-SATA 1.8″) M4 M4 (7mm thick) M4 M4 (7mm thick) M4 M4 (7mm thick)	64GB 64GB 64GB 128GB 128GB 256GB 256GB 512GB 512GB	7.5 7.5 7 7.5 7.5 7.5 7.5 7.5 7.5	10 10 10 10 10 10 10 8 8	3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs	$1.56/GB $1.64/GB $2.06/GB $1.39/GB $1.25/GB $1.34/GB $1.35/GB $1.30/GB $1.37/GB	$100 $105 $132 $178 $160 $342 $345 $664 $700
Intel	320 Series – Retail 320 Series – Retail 320 Series 1.8″ – OEM 320 Series – Retail 320 Series 1.8″ – OEM	80GB 120GB 160GB 300GB 300GB	5.5 5.5 5.5 5.5 5.5	8 10 8 8.5 8?	5yrs 5yrs 1yr 5yrs 1yr	$1.75/GB $1.57/GB $2.00/GB $1.77/GB $1.77/GB	$140 $188 $320 $530 $530
Kingston	HyperX HyperX	120GB 240GB	9.7 9.7	9 8	3yrs 3yrs	$1.74/GB $1.83/GB	$215 $440
Mushkin	Enhanced Chronos Enhanced Chronos Deluxe Enhanced Chronos Enhanced Chronos Deluxe Enhanced Chronos Enhanced Chronos Enhanced Chronos Enhanced Chronos Deluxe	60GB 60GB 120GB 120GB 180GB 240GB 480GB 480GB	~8.5 ~9.4 ~8.5 ~9.4 ~8.5 ~8.5 ~8.1 ~8.8	10 9 10 9 9 9 9 9	3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs	$1.83/GB $2.17/GB $1.42/GB $1.79/GB $1.33/GB $1.25/GB $1.38/GB $1.67/GB	$110 $130 $170 $215 $240 $300 $660 $800
OCZ	Vertex 3 Agility 3 RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-E 4x RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-E 4x	60GB 240GB 480GB 960GB	9 8.1 11+ 11+	7 7 8 8	3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs	$1.83/GB $1.24/GB $3.03/GB $3.33/GB	$103 $298 $1450 $3200
Patriot	Torqx 2	32GB	~5	8	3yrs	$1.88/GB	$60
Plextor	PX-M3S	256GB	7.5	10	5yrs	$1.29/GB	$330
Samsung	830 Series (7mm thick) 830 Series (7mm thick) 830 Series (7mm thick) 830 Series (7mm thick) Out of stock	64GB 128GB 256GB 512GB	9 9 9 9	10 10 10 10	3yrs 3yrs 3yrs 3yrs	$1.72/GB $1.64/GB $1.56/GB $?.??/GB	$110 $210 $405 $???
Sandisk	Ultra	120GB	5	9	3yrs	$1.17/GB	$140

Share your feedback on the SSD comparative table
Seeing as the SSD comparative table is a relatively new addition to the article, some of you to disagree with my numbers. If that is the case, I invite you to leave a comment and to respectfully explain why you disagree, using factual data to back up your claims. If I am indeed mistaken, I’ll make you sure to update the data in the table.

Also, if you have any suggestion to improve the SSD comparative table, let me know.

Reliability:

Reliability varies within a brand from one series to another and varies within a series from one capacity point to another. Reliability has more to do with specific series at a specific storage capacity than just brands or series themselves.

For example, do not buy lets say a 180GB Force 3 SSD from the Corsair brand because you heard good things about the brand (Corsair) or the series (Force 3) or the 120GB model. Instead, buy a Corsair Force 3 180GB because you heard good things about that specific model from that specific brand with that specific storage capacity.

This explains why I’ll sometimes recommend some models with a specific storage capacity from a line-up (e.g. Corsair Force 3) that are reliable but not other models from the same line-up with a different storage capacity that aren’t as reliable.

After all, part of my job is to help you figure out which specific models are reliable and which ones are to avoid. If you have any doubt about the reliability of a specific model that isn’t listed in the table, feel free to ask me in the comments why I didn’t list it.

Best SSD for up to $60:

Patriot Torqx 2 2.5″ 32GB SATA II SSD

• Price: $60
• Capacity: 32GB
• Price per GB: $1.88/GB
• Controller: Phison PS PS3105-S5
• Performance: 5/10
• Reliability: 8/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Unknown at this time.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? No.

Down $10 compared to last month, the Patriot Torqx cost per GB dropped below $2/GB, now being $1.88 per GB.

At $60, it’s also the least expensive SSD that I recommend.

If you’re looking for a SSD to upgrade an older machine, or simply to host the OS along with a few important applications/games, at a minimum cost, this is my recommendation.

It’s not the best or largest SSD, but for $60, it’s a great choice to give a second life to an older machine or laptop that doesn’t need much capacity, or as a boot drive that hosts the OS along with a few important applications/games.

Be assured that despite its low price, this drive is still reliable and does have TRIM support. It does not includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter, so if you want to use it in a desktop, make sure that either your case supports 2.5″ drives or get a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket, such as the $5- Rosewill RX-C200P 2.5″ SSD / HDD Mounting Kit for 3.5″ Drive Bay adapter.

Best SSD for $95:

Corsair Force 3 60 GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $95
• Capacity: 60GB
• Price per GB: $1.65/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd generation
• Performance: 8.3/10
• Reliability: 8/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top notch
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

Recommended if you want a fairly reliable and fairly fast 60GB SSD at a great price.

Best SSD for $110:

Samsung 830 64 GB 2.5 Inch SATA III SSD

• Price: $110
• Capacity: 64GB
• Price per GB: $1.72/GB
• Controller: Samsung
• Performance: 9/10
• Reliability: 10/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, but poor long-term performance, not recommended for RAID.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

For $15 more than the Corsair Force 3 60GB recommended as the best SSD for $95, the Samsung 830 64GB offers an extra 4GB of storage capacity, higher performance and higher reliability.

Best SSD for $140:

SanDisk Ultra 2.5″ 120GB SATAII SSD

• Price: $140
• Capacity: 120GB
• Price per GB: $1.17/GB
• Controller: SandForce First Generation
• Performance: 5/10
• Reliability: 9/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch performance
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? No.

The Sandisk Ultra 120GB offers good performance and top-notch reliability at a incredibly low price of $140 for 120GB of storage capacity or $1.17/GB.

It does not includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter, so if you want to use it in a desktop, make sure that either your case supports 2.5″ drives or get a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket, such as the $5- Rosewill RX-C200P 2.5″ SSD / HDD Mounting Kit for 3.5″ Drive Bay adapter.

Best SSD for $170:

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 120GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $170
• Capacity: 120GB
• Price per GB: $1.42/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd Generation
• Performance: 8.5/10
• Reliability: 10/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

Replacing the Corsair Force 3 120GB, the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 120GB offers slightly higher performance, as well as higher reliability. Compared to the Sandisk Ultra 120GB SSD recommended above, the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos offers higher performance as well as an included 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter.

Best SSD for $215:

Kingston HyperX 120GB SATA III SSD

$154.99 after the $60 Mail-in Rebate!

• Price: $215
• Capacity : 120GB
• Price per GB: $1.79/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd generation
• Performance: 9.7/10
• Reliability: 10/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? No.

Compared to the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 120GB recommended above, the Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD offers even higher performance, without sacrificing reliability.

As a matter of a fact, the Kingston HyperX series is pretty much the fastest 2.5″ SSD series available on the market right now.

At $155 after the Mail-in Rebate, this is one outstanding deal for a top-notch SSD.

Best SSD for $240:

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 180GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $240
• Capacity: 180GB
• Price per GB: $1.34/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd Generation
• Performance: 8.5/10
• Reliability: 9/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

Replacing the Corsair Force 3 180GB, the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 180GB offers slightly higher performance, as well as higher reliability.

Higher performance, same capacity but higher price alternative:
If you want slightly higher performance and slightly higher reliability without sacrificing capacity, the $270 – Corsair Force GT 180GB SATA III SSD is a solid alternative, with a 9/10 for performance and a 10/10 for reliability.

Best SSD for $300:

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 240GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $300
• Capacity: 240GB
• Price per GiB: $1.25/GB
• Controller: SandForce Second Generation
• Performance: 8.5/10
• Reliability: 9/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

Replacing the Corsair Force GT 180GB SSD, the Mushkin 240GB offers 60GB more storage capacity at a similar price with slightly lower performance (8.5 vs 9) and similar great reliability.

Best SSD for $330:

Plextor PX-M3S 256GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $330
• Capacity: 256GB
• Price per GB: $1.29/GB
• Controller: Marvell
• Performance: 7.5/10
• Reliability: 10/10
• Warranty: 5 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, but poor long-term performance, not recommended for RAID.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes

Replacing the Crucial M4 256GB SSD, the Plextor PX-M3S 256GB SSD offers similar performance and the same great reliability as the M4, as well as a longer 5 years warranty and an included 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter.

Its price dropped $35 compared to last month, so you’re interested by it, now is a good time to buy it.

Best SSD for $405:

Samsung 830 Series 256GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $405
• Capacity: 256GB
• Price per GB: $1.58/GB
• Controller: Samsung
• Performance: 9/10
• Reliability: 10/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, but poor long-term performance, not recommended for RAID.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

Replacing the Corsair Force GT 240GB, the Samsung 830 series offers an additional 16GB of storage capacity, similar performance as well as higher reliability, for a similar price.

Higher performance alternative:

If you want top-notch performance, I gave the $440 – Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA III SSD a 9.7 performance rating. With a 8 rating for reliability, it’s a bit less reliable than the Samsung 830 series SSD, but it remains still reliable. Another slight downside is its lower capacity, at 240GB.

Best SSD for $660:

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 480GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $660
• Capacity: 480GB
• Price per GB: $1.38/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd generation
• Performance: 8.1/10
• Reliability: 9/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes

Thanks to a $40 price cut, the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos offers great performance and reliability at an even better price of $1.38 per GB.

Best SSD for $800:

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe 480GB SATA III SSD

• Price: $800
• Capacity: 480GB
• Price per GB: $1.67/GB
• Controller: SandForce 2nd generation
• Performance: 8.8/10
• Reliability: ~9/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Yes
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? Yes.

With the Corsair Force GT 480GB price being up by close to $80, it gets replaced by the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe which very slightly lower performance (-0.2 performance rating) and higher reliability at a much lower price.

Note that for some reason, the Newegg product page names it the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos, without the Deluxe, but if you look at the product model (MKNSSDCR480GB-DX) and the product pictures, it’s clearly the Deluxe version.

Best SSD for $1500:

OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB PCI-Express 2.0 4x SSD

• Price: $1450
• Capacity: 480GB
• Price per GB: $3.03/GB
• Controller: 4 x Sandforce 2nd generation
• Performance: 11+
• Reliability: 8/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Nope, due to internal RAID.
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? N/A: PCI-Express card.

Now $1450, after a $210 price cut compared to last month!

From AnandTech preview:
“For the majority of users the RevoDrive 3 X2 is simply overkill. I even demonstrated in some of our IO bound tests that you’re bottlenecked by the workload before you’re limited by the hardware. That being said, if you have the right workload – I’ve already shown that you can push nearly 1.5GB/s of data through the card and hit random IOPS numbers of over 180K (~756MB/s in our QD32 test)…”

Simply put, this solution isn’t for the average gamer, it is more targeted to Workstation users, who work with heavy workloads, such as HD+ videos, big databases, etc.

Best SSD for $3200:

OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 960GB PCI-Express 2.0 4x SSD

• Price: $3200
• Capacity: 960GB
• Price per GB: $3.33/GB
• Controller: 4 x Sandforce 2nd generation
• Performance: 11+
• Reliability: 8/10
• Warranty: 3 years
• TRIM support: Nope, due to internal RAID.
• Garbage collection (i.e no TRIM, for RAID)? Yes, top-notch.
• Includes a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bracket adapter? N/A: PCI-Express card.

Same as the previous recommendation, simply with twice the storage capacity.

Updating the SSD firmware

Recommended to get the latest bug fixes and the best performance possible out of your SSD.

Before you start using your SSD, I strongly urge you to update the SSD’s firmware to get the latest bug fixes and the best performance. Make sure to read the instructions available on each update page, in order to understand how to properly update the firmware.

Most SSDs have newer firmware available than the one that they are shipped with, so make sure to double-check your SSD’s firmware version and to update it if’s not the latest.

If you update your SSD’s firmware after starting to use it, make sure to backup your data beforehand, as something could go wrong during the update process and you could lose the data on the SSD.

If you have questions regarding firmware updates, contact the manufacturer or visit their support forums.

If a drive isn’t listed here, it’s either because I am unaware of a recent firmware release or because the drive does not need a firmware update (i.e. it ships with the latest one).

- Crucial C300/M4: Their latest firmwares are available here. There was a new firmware release for M4 SSDs in January.
- Intel 320: The latest firmwares are available here.
- OCZ Vertex 3, Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Agility 3, Solid 3, Revodrive 3 and Revodrive 3 X2: The latest firmwares are available here.
- OCZ Octane: The latest firmware increases write performance and it’s available here.
- Corsair Force (NOT Force 3 or Force GT): The latest firmware is available here.
- Corsair Force 3 and Force GT: The latest firmwares are available here.
- Kingston HyperX: The latest firmwares are available here.
- Mushkin Enhanced Chronos and Enhanced Chronos Deluxe: The latest firmware is available here.
- Patriot Torqx 2: The latest firmware is available here.
- Samsung 830 Series: The latest firmware is available here. There was a new firmware release for the Samsung 830 SSDs in January.

The Best Hard Drives For Your Money

February 2012 update:

Western Digital and Seagate reduced the length of their warranties:
Effective Jan. 2nd 2012, Western Digital is reducing their warranty on their Caviar Blue and Green hard drives from 3 years to 2 years.

Effective Dec. 31st 2011, Seagate is reducing their warranty from 5 years to 3 years on their Constellation.2. Constellation ES.2 and Barracuda XT hard drives, while the previously 2 years warranty on the Barracuda, Barracuda Green and Momentus 2.5″ hard drives gets reduced to 1 year.

Do note that these changes do not affect previously sold hard drives warranties and only applies to hard drives shipped after those dates, so you might still be able to find hard drives with the longer warranties for some time.

Needless to say, this move from WD and Seagate has pretty bad timing, following their purchase of Hitachi and Samsung hard drive divisions respectively and the flooding of course.

Seagate new Barracuda hard drives:
In November, Seagate launched their latest Barracuda line-up of hard drives, featuring higher density, with 1TB per platter.

Performance wise, they simply dominate the competition, as you can see here in this HardwareCanucks review.

Performance

Performance wise, the latest Seagate Barracuda hard drives top the charts, followed by the Western Digital Caviar Black and the Samsung F3 hard drives tied for 2nd and the Hitachi drives in last place. Keep in mind that the performance difference between each hard drive isn’t significant enough to make a perceivable impact in the vast majority of situations.

SATA II 3.0Gb/s vs SATA III 6.0Gb/s: No performance difference for hard drives!

SATA 3.0 Gb/s (SATA II) and SATA 6.0Gb/s (SATA III) refer to the speed of the connection between the drive and the motherboard.

However, the best hard drives reach about 210MB/s (or 1.68Gb/s) in best scenarios. SATA 3.0Gb/s is plenty enough to handle that and for hard drives, SATA 6.0Gb/s does not offer any performance advantage, since the hard drives can’t even max out a SATA II 3.0Gb/s connection.

Only SSDs take advantage of SATA 6.0Gb/s due to their higher transfer rates.

In other words, if you take two otherwise identical hard drives, the SATA III model will not be faster than the SATA II model. SATA III for hard drives is just a marketing scheme

Hard Drive Failure Rates:

From Marc Prieur, of hardware.fr, here are the hard drives failures rates according to a French e-tailer as of October 2011:

1. Samsung 1.5%
2. Seagate 1.8% (1.6% if you take out the 7200.12 160GB)
3. Western Digital 2.0%
4. Hitachi 3.0%

The failure rates are based on parts sold between October 1st 2010 and April 1st 2011, for returns before October 2011, so it represents 6 months to one year of usage. The statistics per brand are based on a sample of at least 500 sales.

Do note that although these numbers don’t paint the complete picture of world wide failure rates, but they are still an interesting sample to look at.

All hard drives and all SSDs are prone to failure though, which is why you should Have a Backup System that you can rely on!

Update on availability of hard drives:

Following the major flooding in Thailand last fall:
If you were not aware of this yet, there has been a horrible flooding in Thailand last fall, which has resulted in:

A horrible human tragedy and Western Digital/Seagate (who now pretty much owns Samsung hard drive division) been forced to cut down their production of hard drives since October, due to either factories or suppliers of hard drive parts that were affected by the flooding.

While production has resumed in many factories, it will most likely take another 4 to 7 months before availability to return to normal and for prices to return to what we were used to before, according to Seagate and Western Digital statements.

Update on prices of hard drives:

Prices of hard drives haven’t changed much since last month, although they seem to be on a slightly downward trajectory.

The Best Hard Drives For Your Money:

Prices as of February 1st 7:15PM EST:

The recommended Best Hard Drives For Your Money are in Bold
Alternatives are in Italic

High performance 7,200rpm hard drives:

• $70 – Western Digital Caviar Blue 250 GB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM – The Best $70 hard drive, offering a 250GB storage capacity for $70.
• $85 – Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200rpm 3.5″ ST500DM002 – (New model) The Best $85 hard drive, offering a 500GB capacity with top-notch performance for $85.
• $88 – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200rpm SATA III 16MB Cache – An alternative, with somewhat lower performance, currently at a slightly higher price.
• $123 – Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 (New Model) 1TB 7200rpm SATA III - The best $123 hard drive, offering a 1TB capacity with top-notch performance.
• $160 – Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200rpm SATA II – No longer the top-dog when it comes to performance, the Spinpoint F3 1TB still offers great performance and the best reliability when it comes to hard drives, making it an excellent alternative.
• $170 – Seagate Barraduca ST2000DM001 (New Model) 2TB 7200rpm SATA III – The best ~$170 hard drive, offering a 2TB capacity with top-notch performance.
• $215 – Seagate Barraduca ST3000DM001 (New Model) 3TB 7200rpm SATA III – The best ~$215 hard drive, offering a 3TB capacity with top-notch performance.

Lower performance/lower power consumption “Green” hard drives, ideal for storing media, backups, etc.:

• $102 – Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB
• $130 – Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB
• $157 – Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5TB
• $220 – Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB

RAID 0,1,5 and 10: A quick and easy summary

I’ve been asked by a few of you to explain RAID and the different modes in simple terms. In short, RAID consists of combining two or more hard drives (Or SSDs) to improve performance and/or reliability.

While there are other modes than 0, 1, 5 and 10 (1+0), these are the main ones that usually come integrated on motherboards (Not all motherboards support RAID) , so they are the modes that most of you have access to, hence why I’ll focus on these. Let’s get started!

An important note on using RAID for data loss protection:

Hard drives and SSDs do fail and RAID is not perfect. Sometimes, multiple drives will fail at once (Due to a faulty power supply, power surge, etc.). RAID has limits and is not a 100% fool proof solution for data backup.

It should only be used as one of many steps to protect your data, along with a Backup System that you can rely on!

Note:

In most cases, with motherboard’s integrated RAID controller, you must set up RAID within the BIOS and/or disk manager (i.e. Intel Matrix) prior to installing the OS. Consult your motherboard manual for details on how to set up RAID.

RAID 0:

Using a minimum of two drives and as many as you can install (3,4,5,6,etc.), the data is spread across all the drives, basically combining their read and write performance into one ultra-fast array.

The easiest and cheapest option to improve performance, you keep 100% of the combined drives capacity, but if any drive fails, you lose all data.

Important:

The more drives that you have in your RAID 0 array, the more likely it is to fail. You also get diminishing returns as you add more and more drives:

• Two drives, get a theoretical 100% I/O performance gain but double risk of failure.
• Three drives, get a theoretical 50% further performance gain but triple risk of failure.
• Four drives, get a theoretical 25% further performance gain but quadruple risk of failure.
• Five drives, get a theoretical 20% further performance gain and so on…

So you’ll want to avoid putting critical data that you can’t afford to lose on a RAID 0 array or at the very least, you’ll want to back it up somewhere else as well, since this is the least reliable solution, even less than a single drive.

RAID 1:

Using two drives, the second drive is a live backup of the first one, being an exact copy of it.

You lose a bit of write speed compared to a single drive (due to the overhead of copying the same data in real-time to two different drives), do gain read performance (Since the OS can read from both the drives) but you only get the capacity of one of the two drives (Two 1TB drives in RAID 1 =1TB total capacity).

The main pro is that you get a higher level of redundancy/reliability, compared to a single drive.

If one drive fails you do not lose data, you are still able to use the PC, but you will need to replace the drive and rebuild the RAID array before regaining redundancy and data loss protection from RAID 1.

RAID 5:

Requires a minimum of three drives. Unlike RAID 1 where data is identical on every drive, with RAID 5, data is spread across the drives, with parity bits spread across the drives in a way that if one drive fails, the RAID array will continue to function without any apparent change, other than some performance loss.

However, like with RAID 1, if you lose a drive, you’ll need to replace it before regaining redundancy and data loss protection from RAID 5.

RAID 1 vs RAID 5:

Both RAID 1 (mirroring or duplexing) or RAID 5 (striping with parity) offer good data redundancy should a single drive in a RAID array fail. The major difference however can be found in the system performance between RAID 1 and RAID 5.

RAID 5 experiences more heavy write overhead because of the additional parity data that has to be created and is then written to the disk array. RAID 1 does not experience this overhead.

Read performance, on the other hand, is usually better with a RAID 5 setup. This gets even better if your RAID 5 array has more than 3 disk.

RAID 5 read performance increases with more drives in an array because the more drives there are, the more read/write heads there are, and RAID 5 arrays have the awesome ability to read simultaneously from all the drives at the same time.

RAID 1 only has two drives by nature and is therefore limited in the number of read/write heads.

So in short, if all you want is decent redundancy and don’t care that much about performance, RAID 1 will be just fine. If you want more read performance (For faster applications launch, faster OS and game loading) and capacity (since RAID 1 is limited to two drives in most cases and more would be somewhat pointless), RAID 5 is the best out of the two.

RAID 10 (1+0):

However, if you want top notch performance and redundancy, RAID 1+0 (or 10, same thing) is the way to go. Basically, it’s a combination of RAID 1 redundancy with RAID 0 performance.

While RAID 1+0 is possible with two drives, four drives is preferable if you want the performance benefits.

Conclusion

What’s coming next?

Intel replacement to the 510 series:
Intel 510 series replacement, codename “Cherryville” was delayed and is now expected to be launched sometime during Q1 2012. Last thing I read was that they will use a SandForce controller, but with Intel’s firmware and Intel’s quality control.

What 2012 reserves for us:
In the first half of 2012, we’ll see the first 20nm chips make their way in SSDs. Their smaller size and lower manufacturing costs should eventually help reduce the cost of SSDs. We might also see some new controllers, but I simply don’t know much more than that at this point in time.

For more on what 2012 and 2013 reserve for us, I invite you to read this excellent AnandTech article.