A local shop has the V300 (on sale) at 90 eur and the Samsung 840 (not on sale) is a bit more expensive at 102 eur. Don't know what the normal price is until the sale ends.

I no experience with the Samsung and heard not much comments about it. Samsung on seems to be a lot slower in writing and a bit faster in reading. Both have 3 year warranty.

Personally from those two choises I'd choose the V300 because Kingston is cheaper (to me) and a lot faster in writes. On the other hand, a cheap drive now that is fast enough will do anyway. Does it really matter which one it is, it dies when flash cells wear out and the next drive will be even better and larger.

Taking into consideration my current PC has only 3Gbit/s SATA interface, it is my current bottleneck, not the read and write speeds of the SSD.
If you have 6Gbit/s SATA interface, it might affect your selection. Also the accessories that come with the SSD may be important to you, there could be brackets to fit a 2.5" SSD drive into 3.5" slot, or USB cradle to assist in data transfer, or disk cloning software.

I can recommend the Samsung Pro 840, got one of these in my new gaming rig, it is very fast indeed.

Got the 256GB model but they also have a 128 and 512 GB models.

Just bought the Kingston V300 for my main rig; it's incredible how fast I can boot now on a Z87 based board. BIOS to desktop in like 5 seconds. From everything I've read, SSD's like this are bound to be more reliable for longer than a standard mechanical drive too, so even if you factor in cost, it's still a good value. I'm using Sata 6, so there's no bottleneck, but even an older controller should benefit greatly. I noticed the biggest benefit when installing things, your write speed is just a constant stream and seems to be equal to your read speed. For features you don't want to go too cheap, TRIM extends the life and reliability of your drive, so don't skimp. Also the newer controllers are much better than first generation SSD's or very cheap (OCZ) drives. Expect to spend 150-200 USD.

F2bnp wrote:

I'd love to get something better like an 840 Pro or Vertex 4 but I just don't have that kind of money to spend on an SSD.

BigBodZod wrote:

I can recommend the Samsung Pro 840, got one of these in my new gaming rig, it is very fast indeed.

Duralisis, I do have a SATA III Motherboard. It's Gigabyte GA970A-D3. What do you mean I don't want to go cheap on features? They're standard aren't they?
I just have little idea what the features are and how you use them. For example, TRIM. Is it enabled through Windows or 3rd party programs?
What else should I keep in mind for SSD's? Virtual Memory etc

There are only a few SSD controller manufacturers who supply their firmware to all their customers. So to be honest in the end it's pure marketing with companies putting stickers on their products and that's it.

Some companies do their own flash memory like Sandisk or Samsung or make custom changes to their firmware, but the bread and butter firmware stuff is all the same.

Over here in Australia a really cheap storage company is Silicon Power. I buy RAM from them, they do great value USB 3.0 flash drives and also SSD drives. I have a 60GB in my media PC, a 120GB in my gaming PC. Only in my work PC I have a different brand, a 256GB OCZ (not sure which mode, petrol or something) because I got it last year and it was a sale for $199.

In my PS3 I have a 750GB hybrid SSD from Toshiba. And that's something you could do, get a cache SSD of 32 or 64GB, many companies sell them.

The other main technological difference is compression vs. not. Sandisk controllers compress data, so the actual speed depends heavily on what data is used, hence you find differences in the benchmarks,

OS: You want to have Windows 7 and you do want a standard HDD in the machine with all the documents, media, picture folders moved over.

On a 60 GB SSD you can't do much and even on a 120GB you have to watch what you're downloading and where...

Most companies have firmware updates, so I recommend doing this straight after you purchase it to be up to date. The procedures can often be quite involving, but something that has to be done.

SSDs wear and tear is because of writes. Reads are a non issue. So it also depends what you do with your machine.

And finally performance differences are great on paper, but can you notice the difference between 300 and 400MB/s? You might on a top of the line Core i7, but the main benefit is zero access time and that's something all SSD drives have in common. So I wouldn't worry about benchmarks too much.

And you will need a decent backup strategy. Be prepared, no surprised, that one day you turn on the machine and your SSD is dead. There is nothing you can do, no sticking the drive in the freezer tricks, it's gone. SSDs are about performance, reliability is still improving, but you hear many people in forums with their SSDs suddenly not working anymore.

Samsung has TLC cells which have much lower write endurance than Kingston's MLC.
Ofc as Mau1wurf1977 says, SSD can die for whatever reason before the write cycles are actually used up...

Jepael wrote:

Does it really matter which one it is, it dies when flash cells wear out and the next drive will be even better and larger.

You're more likely to replace it because of size and speed than the drive dieing on you. Real life torture tests show you need extreme amount of usage before the cells die which won't happen for 99% of users.
I've been using SSD's since the first generation (2x32GB in RAID0) and they still work fine. Actually I've put one of them into my Compaq now (disk access/transfer is almost as fast as the SDRAM memory 🤣). Their performance compared to todays SSDs are laughable, but that is not what matters, what matters it the zero access time. That is what makes the big difference. As maur1wurf1977 says, 300 vs 400 mb/s is not something you notice in real life.

All right, thanks for the tips guys. The Kingston is the cheaper one right now, so I'm going for it.

duralisis wrote:

Just bought the Kingston V300 for my main rig; it's incredible how fast I can boot now on a Z87 based board. BIOS to desktop in like 5 seconds. From everything I've read, SSD's like this are bound to be more reliable for longer than a standard mechanical drive too, so even if you factor in cost, it's still a good value. I'm using Sata 6, so there's no bottleneck, but even an older controller should benefit greatly. I noticed the biggest benefit when installing things, your write speed is just a constant stream and seems to be equal to your read speed. For features you don't want to go too cheap, TRIM extends the life and reliability of your drive, so don't skimp. Also the newer controllers are much better than first generation SSD's or very cheap (OCZ) drives. Expect to spend 150-200 USD.

That is only situational, with every shrink the cell read/write cycle life decreases and it is already down to just 10k cycles in modern slc based ssd. The only reason why people have yet to see any real problems is that modern drives use vastly improved controllers and superior algorithms for controlling how data is written to each cell/block. The over provision on many drives is to help deal with this issues as the ssd ages during normal use. In the long run changing how one uses the ssd and system settings will improve the over all life of any ssd even the crappiest generics can be made to last.

If you want crap, there's my EeePC 900. It has 4GB and 16GB "SSD" drives based on compactflash controllers (lol). The 4GB is somewhat fast and is SLC based but it still has terrible 4k write speed and causes stutters and pauses. The 16GB is MLC and its small write performance is similar to a floppy drive. Running an OS on it would be unbearable. But both of these are more pleasant in ways than a HDD because of the access time. Windows boots fast for example. Plus they won't die from mechanical shock and it's hard not to bump a 9" notebook around.

It seems that SSDs die from defects frequently (mainly OCZ perhaps heh) but flash wear death in a drive with a recent controller is unheard of AFAIK.

Got myself the V300 and I'm now waiting for it to arrive. Thanks for the help guys!