Best Solid State Hard Drives: The Top Three With Two Honorable Mentions
Best Solid State Hard Drives:
The big companies dominating the hard disk drive industry like Toshiba, Buffalo, and Western Digital among others seem to be absent in the list of the best solid state hard drives.
This emerging technology has been dominated by the new players of the industry.
Those relatively new companies who began as a startup years ago and were not afraid to venture into this new storage technology occupied the sweet spots of the list.
The list of the best solid state hard drives is about storage capacities comparable to that of hard disk drives ranging between 64 and 640 GB, but with sequential read and write speeds reaching up to 355 megabytes per second (mbps) and 275 Mbps, respectively.
These speeds topple even those of the best hard disk drives currently available.
Of course, other considerations such as portability of the storage device and its compatibility with the current interface technologies are important.
Support for self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T.) is also essential along with the capabilities to implement TRIM commands for efficiently allocating free storage space.
OCZ Vertex 2
At $210, the Vertex 2 manufactured by OCZ Technology, which was founded in 2002, tops the list with amazingly fast random write rates at 50,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS).
It is certainly a drastic improvement over the old Vertex SSD. The SandForce controller along with integrated caching makes the device very efficient.
Second on the list is Agility 2 produced by the same company.
It is a little expensive at $225 and with similar specifications as the Vertex 2 such as sequential read and write speeds of up to 285 and 275 Mbps, respectively.
Both devices also have very long life expectancy rated at 2 million hours measured in mean time between failure (MTBF) standard.
Nonetheless, the Agility 2 is inferior with regards to random write achieving only up to 10,000 IOPS.
Corsair Force
With a price close to $300, Corsair Force also uses the SandForce controller which enables high-performance storage.
It has a better random write rate over the Agility 2 at 15,000 IOPS but with poor client support.
Overall, the Corsair Force is a tough competitor in the industry.
Crucial RealSSD C300
With a price sitting in between that of OCZ Vertex 2 and Corsair Force, Crucial RealSSD C300 at $250 sports the most sizable onboard cache at 256 MB.
It has the fastest sequential read speed of up to 355 Mbps but is matched with a slower sequential write speed at 140 Mbps.
Random write is also commendable at 30,000 IOPS. Furthermore, client support is also excellent.
Other brands joining the list of the best solid state hard drives include Patriot Memory Torqx M28 and Kingston SSD Now V+.
With more players entering the industry and with technologies continually developing, SSDs are becoming cheaper and more efficient.
