We've often touted a solid state drive as being the best upgrade you give a PC - and here are our favourites
If you're upgrading a PC, it's getting harder and harder to ignore the positive effect that putting an SSD in a system can have. These days, memory and processors are so quick that mechanical drives simply can't keep up, and create a bottleneck that hampers performance in all areas - from boot times to framerates within games. Swapping your old hard drive for a solid state alternative will up your system speeds across the board.
The benefits of a solid state drive aren't just limited to speed, either. SSDs are more compact, make less noise and generate less heat. They're also less prone to failure and live longer. In almost every way you can think of, SSDs are superior to mechanical drives, except for the small problem of them being considerably more expensive in terms of cost per gigabyte. This puts a dampener on many people's enthusiasm for them; for the same price as a 500GB SSD, you could fill a system with enough multi-terabyte mechanical drives to last you for years.
There's no rule that says you can't have both, though. SSDs might not be cheap - but they are, finally, cheap enough. Why buy four terabytes of mechanical space you'll never fill, when you could buy a terabyte of file storage and 256GB of pure speed to run your operating system and software from?
Assuming you're convinced, the next step is choosing an SSD. Here, things get tricky: distinguishing the new from the old can be difficult, and it's hard to tell what makes one better than another. To try and help, we've taken a look at the current SSD retail market to see what models you'll find, and why you'd want to buy them (or not). If you want to stay on the cutting edge, this list of SSDs will be your guide.
Adata XPG SX900
Available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities, the Adata XPG SX900 has a few miles on the clock. It was originally released in February 2012, and sports the familiar and unremarkable SF-2281 SandForce controller, so there's not much interesting about it. Prices for the various models range from £48 to £183, so they're at the extreme cheap end of SSD pricing - but then, at their age, you'd hope so. The storage itself is made of 20nm MLC NAND cells, and speeds aren't hugely impressive on any model - all within the 520-560MB/S range. Not bad if you want a low-price SSD, but it's hard to get excited about in any quarter.
Corsair Neutron GTX
The Neutron GTX is Corsair's flagship line of SSDs, designed for high-end desktops and notebooks. Available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB, prices range from £86 to £288 with the 240GB model particularly well-priced at £143. These SSDs have also been around a while (May 2012) but use the less common LAMD LM87800 controller, which has better performance than the SandForce. Again, expect speeds of 500MB/S and above. One good reason to favour the Neutron GTX line over any other is its use of Toggle NAND, which has better performance than MLC and lasts a lot longer - hence the expensive price on this rather old line of SSDs.
Crucial M500
The Crucial M500 line was released in July 2013 as a successor to the M4 line, and it's a strong reminder of the company's credentials as SSD pioneers, even if it's since been surpassed by the M550. Still available in capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB, speeds are strong, but not excessively high: 500MB/S read and 400MB/S write (80k IOPS read and write). The controller is the Marvell 88SS9187 found in some of SanDisk's SSDs, but without SanDisk's customisation it doesn't perform as well. The flash memory is 20nm MLC NAND. As a package, it's the combination of a low price and high capacity that makes it special. Costs range from £80 for a 240GB drive to £315 for the 960GB, and at £154 the 480GB version is still a great way to get a high-capacity SSD for a low price.
Crucial M550
Released about a year ago, the Crucial M550 line improved on Crucial's already-strong M500 performance to create one of the best SSDs on the market. Although it looks like a minor upgrade, numerically speaking, the M550 has a new controller and manages to offer slightly more space than the M500 by dropping the amount of NAND flash kept in reserve. This means that drive health is theoretically worse in the long term, but estimates show that the M500 was overly conservative about how many of its cells would fail. Read and write speeds are comfortably above 500MB/S for large files, and read/write speeds were vastly improved for small file sizes too. Capacities range from 128GB to 1TB, priced £70 to £350. That's not bad for a 1TB drive, but the 256GB is a steal at £120.
Crucial BX100
One of the most recent SSDs in this entire guide, the BX100 line was released at the start of this year and comes in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities. It's a budget SSD, which uses Silicon Motion's much-praised 2246EN controller and 16nm NAND, but drops some of the M-series enterprise features - so no hardware encryption or SLC caching. The price ranges from £50 for the 120GB model to £285 for the 1TB model - so it's as cheap a 1TB SSD as you can get despite being right up to date, and while its write speeds aren't fantastic (450MB/S), it's not hard to absorb a 10% speed drop for a 30% saving on price.
Crucial МХ100/MX200
The Crucial МХ100 was a low-priced SSD aimed at mainstream users, but which is in the process of being replaced by a 2015 refresh called the MX200. The only notable change between the two models is that the MX200 features SLC caching (called 'Dynamic Write Acceleration'). Both drives feature a Marvell 88SS9189 controlled with 16nm NAND and eDrive encryption. The MX200 is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities priced £110-£380, and the slightly slower MX100 is available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities priced £58 to £176. On average, the MX200 is about 10% more expensive than the MX100, which isn't bad for the latest-generation hardware.
Samsung 840 EVO
The Samsung 840 EVO hit shelves in August 2013 and was the first to run on 19nm TLC NAND flash. The use of TLC NAND was notable because no other company offered this type of NAND to the consumer, mostly because it was less durable than MLC NAND. It was more commonly found in flash drives rather than SSDs. The controller in the 840 EVO is Samsung's proprietary multi-core MEX SSD, which can achieve more than double the sequential write performance of the vanilla 840 - 540MB/S write and 520MB/S read. Prices range from £100 for the 120GB version to £310 for the 1TB version.
Samsung 850 EVO
Released in December 2014, the Samsung 850 EVO is a successor to the 840 EVO in terms of balancing power and price, but the internals have largely changed. It's now using V-NAND TLC flash (which is some of the cheapest per-gigabyte yet) with over 500MB/S read and write speeds. Prices for the 850 line start at £70 for 120GB and top out at £360 for 1TB, but the 500GB model is probably the best-priced at £200 for 500GB. Note that the 850 EVO shares a line with the 850 PRO, which is basically the same drive with enterprise features, a 10-year warranty and higher pricing. Like all Samsung drives, it uses Samsung's own controller.
Kingston V300 SSDNow
Released in February 2013, the Kingston SSDNow V300 is available in 60GB, 120GB and 240GB sizes. Based on the same SandForce SF-2281 controller found in many drives around this time period, performance is good, if not great. Sequential Read/ Write are quoted as "up to 450MB/S" with 85k IOPS read and 43k IOPS write, but its performance is actually better than stated (the same 540MB/S read and 520MB/S write found in other SandForce SSDs). You might wonder why Kingston would downplay the performance of its own hardware, but it's probably to drive people towards an enthusiast option, in the form of its HyperX line. Don't be fooled, though: HyperX SSDs cost double what the V300s do, but their performance is only a little better -they're certainly not twice as good!
Kingston V310 SSDNow
In August 2014, Kingston released the V310 SSDNow as an upgrade to the V300 line. Oddly, its performance was rated vastly lower than its predecessor, and it is only available as a 960GB model (at £380 on its own, or £411 with an upgrade kit that includes software and accessories to aid a quick drive clone). That's expensive however you slice it, especially given its low speeds. Essentially, it was developed to appeal to people worried about how to transfer data from their old drive to the new one. An almost baffling release, all things considered.
Intel DC S3500
Added to Intel's SSD range in June 2013, the Intel S3500 drives are sold in capacities from 80GB to a massive 800GB. The drives use 20 nm MLC NAND flash and an Intel-built controller that gives them a maximum of 400k IOPS read and 11.5k IOPS write, translating to 475MB/S read and 450MB/S write. If that sounds like an oddly unbalanced number of operations, it's' because these drives are aimed at the Enterprise market, which means they're "read-oriented". They're therefore best left to non-desktop users. The price ranges from £100 for the 80GB model to £600+ for the 800GB, so in that sense there's not much danger of you buying one anyway!
Intel 530
First released in July 2013, the Intel 530 (Dale Crest) SSDs come in capacities between 80GB and 480GB and use 20nm MLC NAND flash memory with the ultra-reliable SandForce SF-2281 controller capable of 540MB/S sequential read and 490MB/S sequential write (41k IOPS read, 80k IOPS write). Prices range from £65 for 120GB to £200 for 480GB, so there's not a huge financial disincentive to buy them, but it is possible to find similarly capable drives for less.
Intel 730
Available in just two capacities - 240GB and 480GB - Intel's year-old 730 series was an attempt to replace the generic Intel 530 with a better, consumer-focussed drive. The first completely in-house design since the Intel 320, the 730 uses 20nm MLC flash with read/write speeds of 550MB/S and up to 89K IOPS. It uses the same NAND as Intel's enterprise drives and has far better endurance than the 530-series SSDs, but it does lack hardware encryption. It's not the fastest drive in its price class, and £260 for a 480GB drive means it's more expensive than most. It's better than an Intel 530, yes, but it's really competing with the Samsung 850 EVO - and in that sense, it's barely putting up a fight at all.
OCZ Vertex 450/460
The Vertex 450 was released in July 2013 and uses OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller with 20NM MLC NAND, which offers speeds of 540MB/S read and 530MB/S write with 85k IOPS read and 90k IOPS write. It's actually slightly slower at reading data than its predecessor, the Vertex 4, but faster at writing data. The hardware comes in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities and has built-in 256-AES encryption. £95 for 128GB and £361 for 512GB make its pricing unremarkable. Its successor (the Vertex 460) came out about a year later and contained 19nm Toshiba NAND, the same as the higher-priced Vector 150 (but with lower performance-validated parts).
OCZ Vector 150
Part of OCZ's superior Vector line, the Vector 150 is an enthusiast SSD designed from the ground up by OCZ and designed to compete with the Samsung 840 PRO. Available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities, it contains 25nm MLC NAND and has a five-year warranty. Prices range from £75 to £240, making it cheaper than some of the competition while retaining read and write speeds above 500MB/S. The existence of the Vertex 450/460 complicates this slightly older drive's place in the line, but ultimately it's got a good balance of price and performance, considering how high-end it is.