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AnandTech Gives the Skinny On Recent SSD Offerings
omnilynx writes "With capacity on the rise and prices falling, solid state drives are finally starting to compete with traditional hard drives. However, there are still several issues to take into account when moving to an SSD, not to mention choosing between a widening array of offerings. Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech does a better job than anyone could expect detailing those issues (especially those related to performance) and reviewing the new offerings in the SSD arena. Intel's X25 series comes out on top for sheer speed, but OCZ makes a surprise turnaround with its Vertex drive giving perhaps the best value."
I read the article in it's entirety. One thing that I was impressed by was the tremendous power of internet hardware reviewers. The reviewer in the article is some geek with a website, but he influences thousands, probably millions of dollars in sales. In the article, he figures out that the OCZ Vertex is an SSD that actually offers a good price/performance ratio. After reading that, I check newegg.com : yep, the top selling SSDs are the OCZ Vertex and Intel's. Geeks really do look for objective, hard benchmarks to decide what to spend their hard earned cash on. More than that, OCZ actually revised their firmware to meet the reviewer's demands. They would not have done this at all if they had been left to their own devices, and the final product is actually usable. Finally an SSD upgrade is viable : on newegg, the smallest OCZ Vertex drive is 30 gigs, for $108. Two of those in a RAID 0 configuration would be ideal, giving performance exceeding the Intel X-25M for half the cost. ($216 versus $350 for the X-25M) I'm strongly tempted to make the purchase, although I know it'll be even cheaper if I just wait a few more months...