Thursday, October 30, 2014

12 best SSDs 2014: what's the best SSD (solid-state drive) you can buy in the UK?

The Top SSDs (Solid-State Drives) you can buy in the UK in 2014

By  | PC Advisor | 30 October 14

Best SSD 2014

What's the best SSD (solid-state drive) 2014? As prices start to drop and storage capacities increase, PC Advisor charts the best SSDs (solid-state drives) you can buy in the UK. The best SSDs for PC and laptop.

Best SSDs of 2014: Buying advice

Solid-state is standard-issue for storing your data in tablets and smartphones, where it’s relied upon for its tiny size and knock-proof nature. The same assets are handy in desktop and especially laptop PCs, but more traditional computers can also unlock SSDs’ perhaps most prized virtue – their speed.
Instead of a fragile magnetised disk whirring at 90 or 120 times every second, SSDs store binary data in shock-resistant silicon chips. And besides being physically robust, silent, smaller and lighter than any hard-disk drive, the big incentive to opt for a flash drive remains performance. Data can be read and written hundreds of times faster from electronic non-volatile flash cells.
This speed factor is about so much more than go-faster bragging rights though. Old-school desktop computers may still battle it out over who has the fastest processor or the hottest graphics card, but SSD performance is all about the user experience – applications launch in almost no time, web pages spawn faster and files copy in a fraction of the time.
Put simply, and regardless of whether your processor has 3, 5 or 7 after the ‘i’, the wholecomputer just responds so much better to your touch. The only real drawback has been the exortionate price of entry to the premier-class storage club.
Until now maybe. It’s taken six years or more, but we are now at the state where the solid-state drive, the SSD, is a truly affordable component for any computer user. And if your wallet won’t even stretch to £100, just juggle your storage budget instead and get a 256GB drive.
Performance has swelled over the years – not just in the drag-race test of copying big files, but crucially with the way that small files can transfer. Much of the background housekeeping of a modern operating system is with the continual reading and writing of very small files of 4kB or smaller. It’s the random access of these all over the platters that can choke older disks that need to physically move a pickup head across spinning platters.
We’ve reached a point where just about any SSD you put into a computer to replace a hard disk will transform your experience. For performance seekers, there’s still a case for finding the fastest. And that fastest metric is still as much about small-file transfers, which we can measure by the number of input and output operations capable in one second – otherwise known as IOPS. The best SATA flash drives are currently returning figures around 100,000 IOPS, made possible by the way that datastreams can be paralleled together, a major asset of flash over disks.
Performance – in terms of the speed with which data can be read and written – has now effectively plateaued among the best SSDs. It’s not that flash memory has reached its limit, far from it, but the Serial ATA interface between the flash and your computer is now the bottleneck.
Until the next-generation of data interface is ratified, most PCs still use SATA Revision 3 with its 6Gb/s nominal speed, and circa-550MB/s real-world ceiling. Nevertheless, some are forging ahead with alternatives, notably Apple with its adoption of direct PCIe-connected flash drives in its Macs. This busts the old SATA limit to allow speeds of 700MB/s and more on even its cheapest MacBook Air.
Despite current SATA SSDs’ shortcomings, we still test the essential speed, both in large-file sequential transfers and small-file random access, as differences do exist between brands and models.
When buying an SSD, look out for long warranties and high data-write limits if you prize data integrity, although with the help of proper backup routines, data loss is less an issue today. Some SSDs demand more power than others, and where this is known we’d advise against fitting in a laptop if you value your time away from the mains. Also look out for manufacturers that provide accessible support with firmware updates possible on the platform of your choice. Most storage brands are still routed in the Wintel world and don’t make it easy to apply maintenance patches on their drives unless you run Windows.

Best SSDs of 2014: How we test

Each SSD was benchtested on a desktop PC kindly loaned by Chillblast, based on an Asus Z87-A motherboard with Intel Core i7-4770K and 8GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit. We assessed most aspects of a drive’s performance with industry-standard benchmark tests for Windows, namely ATTO Disk Benchmark, HD Tune Pro, HD Tach, CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD.
Measured speeds for storage products are typically in megabytes per second (MB/s) for large files; and input/output operations per second (IOPS) for paralleled small-file transfers.

Best SSDs of 2014: Conclusion

Sometimes group tests of related products elicit one or two clear winners, making these the natural choice in terms of value or performance. This isn’t one of those tests.
In terms of performance, any SSD here will transform a disk-based PC. They will all merrily let you read the entire contents of a 25GB Blu-ray film in less than a minute. They should all allow even Photoshop to launch in just a few seconds. The deciding factors are increasingly now about longevity and price.
Solid-state flash cells will age and wear out, but limited lifespan is a reality of hard disk drives, too, and after some serious concerns in flash technology’s early days, we can be reasonably certain that even with very heavy use, the typical user – even a professional designer, for instance – is unlikely to wear out an SSD inside five years.
Most people are conscious of cost and won’t spend more than is logically necessary, so on that basis, we must point to the best value drives in this group, namely the Seagate 600 and Crucial M550. At the time of writing, these were both priced around 40p per gigabyte, a most attractive offer – especially when compared to the £2 per gigabyte figures of just a couple of years ago.
For the best performance, the Crucial M550 also stands up well, along with the Intel 730 and OCZ Vector 150. Special mention must also go to two drives not in this group, the Samsung 840 Pro and 840 EVO (tinyurl.com/l5edqoy), which offer superb performance at competitive prices. With prices fluctuating weekly, it pays to shop around. By the time you read this group test, this already tempting upgrade may have hit the 30p per gigabyte level.

What's the best SSD: Best SSD 2014

12. Samsung 840 Pro 512GB

There's little doubt that when working correctly the Samsung 840 Pro is one of the top consumer solid-state drives available today. Pricing is very competitive and the essential small-file IOPS performance is on the money too.

11. Samsung 840 EVO mSATA 500 GB

The Samsung 840 EVO in its miniaturised mSATA form remains a force to be reckoned with. It effectively met the performance of the Samsung 840 EVO we first tested last year, and in some metrics was found to slightly exceed those results. If you're looking for a high-performance mSATA SSD for your laptop, PC or storage product we have to concede this little drive really delivers.

10. Plextor M5 Pro

Performance and the quality assurance look to be right up near the top, yet the Plextor M5 Pro is about the cheapest high-performance drive in our recent group test group. With those worthy attributes, it deserves our Best Buy award from a talented group of overachievers.

9. Intel 730 Series SSD 480 GB

Overall, the 730 Series is the most expensive drive on test per gigabyte, but if you want speed at the SATA limit and a formal guarantee of endurance, the Intel SSD will deliver both.

8. Toshiba Q Series Pro 512 GB

The Toshiba Q Series Pro performs close enough to the original Q Series SSD that it can be hard to separate them. We note that Toshiba has expanded its warranty terms, and will now guarantee its Q Series SSD for three years rather than just one.

7. Sandisk Extreme II SSD

The SanDisk Extreme II would have stood out as a well-balanced high-performance SSD among its peers 12 months ago. It still does and now additionally benefits from keen pricing.

6. Seagate 600 SSD

The Seagate 600 SSD is a good value, but high-performance solid?state drive. Now over one year old, it’s available at very competitive prices, which work out at a very reasonable 42p per gigabyte for the larger-capacity 480GB capacity model.

5. Samsung 840 EVO 750GB

The Samsung 840 EVO 750GB is a triumph in solid-state technology, combining for the first time vast capacity by flash standards, with lightning performance, and at an approachable price. Smart data juggling tactics keeps its data moving briskly in real-world daily tasks, to the great benefit of any user lucky to have this drive as their computer's beating heart.

4. Fujifilm HQ-PC Series 512GB

The Fujifilm HQ-PC Series 512GB is a fast and well-mannered solid-state drive, following the solid design of the Toshiba THNSN SSD upon which it appears to be based. With quality assured, it can come down to price to choose which model to buy. Fujifilm’s web shop price is £348.90 for its largest 512 GB model, although you can currently buy the same drive from LambdaTek for £215, making it a much more attractive proposition that undercuts the price of even the Toshiba from most outlets.

3. Crucial M500

Crucial has returned to the hit list of must-have SSDs with its M500. Not because it’s the fastest but because it has great multi-platform PC support, a good balance of large- and small-file transfer speeds, and an attractive price without relying on slower performance three-layer cell (TLC) flash technology. And if it’s terabyte-class flash SATA storage you’re looking for, it’s currently the only player in town.

2. OCZ Vector 150 240 GB

The OCZ Vector 150 is a solid-feeling and impressively performing SSD. It compares well with Intel’s latest performance drive, yet is closer to 50p per gigabyte rather than 75p. At that price, it deserves a strong recommendation.

1. Crucial M550 1 TB

Crucial’s new M550 has significantly pushed up performance. Most importantly, this new model signposts the trend in falling SSD prices, bringing potentially huge capacities within affordable reach.
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