SSD roundup: Vertex 3 vs M4 vs C300 vs 510 vs 320 vs x25-M vs F120 vs Falcon II

[Brahmzy]

Reality though is that in the practical tests there is no real difference between any of the SSD's. Even the Ramdisk shows little improvement when considering how much faster it is compared to an SSD.

This is so true. I've had a TON of different SSDs in a ton of different systems and honestly, especially on an overclocked system, you REALLY have to be paying attention to see much of difference on normal day to day usage.

I've got a 60GB Vertex 1 and it actually boots far faster than 2 V3's (120's OR 240's) - like 3-4 seconds faster. Reason is it doesn't have a creative soundcard in the box. But boot times mean nothing to me, some folks it does, but any SSD is going to boot about the same within a second or two of each other.

As far as general browsing and light usage, in W7 x64, there's ZERO difference between my SSDs. ONLY when I'm doing heavy, heavy multitasking, application installs or large amounts of file copying do I see a difference - and that is maybe 2% of time spent. I can slow my X-25M G2 160 down to a crawl at work with about 40 things open at any given time. That's where I'd love to get a faster SSD. Gaming, yes, levels do load faster in R0 with fast SSDs - tested this a thousand times.

I think we've gotten to the point where unless you're a true 24/7 power user that's got applications or processes that hammer your storage up and down - only then will the fast drives really shine.

4K Random Read is the most important thing for 97% of users.

This is what we all agree on, yet do we see any REAL WORLD difference QD1 4K random reads between any one of those drives in this review make a difference in what we experience?
Yes, on paper and HiMon tell us what goes on in the background, but honestly, Windows does such a good job never exposing any of that to the end user - It has been optimized for spinning disks.

I mean if somebody could convince me that 2 C300 256GB's in R0 would out-perform my 2 V3 240GB's in overall snap/real world experience, I'd buy two, test 'em and sell whatever's the slowest pair. Vice Versa. I am vendor agnostic. I honestly think the collection of various benchmark tools we have along with what the reviewers show, still don't tell the whole story. We need a non-subjective "user experience" benchmark. I think Anand tries to do that in his light/heavy workload tests, but again I don't know if those results reflect real-world usage.

As far as Anand's 2011 new tests somehow favoring the V3's - I don't think that's on purpose - some say Anand has a preference for the intel drives, if any.

The M4 128GB drives do have me very interested - especially if what they're saying - 4k pages on the smaller NAND, is true.