How much should I spend on an SSD?
It's taken years, but we are now at the state where the SSD is a truly affordable component for any computer user. If your wallet won't even stretch to £100 for whats said to be the best on the market, worry not! You can pick up a SSD for as little as £22 inc shipping and even will get you a 500GB SSD for under £80! Sure, a traditional hard drive is still a lot cheaper with a much higher storage capacity. But you can install Windows and your most-used programs on an SSD and keep your music, video and photo libraries on your hard disk drive where performance isn’t as important. But using this setup, you gain sub 10 second boot times, a ultra snappy desktop and having a few of your most frequently installed games or apps on the SSD will make you feel like your PC has gone from a Nissan Micra to a Porche 911 GT3 Turbo!
What to look for in an SSD
For those seeking the very best performance, there's still a case for finding the fastest rather than just choosing the cheapest SSD. This is where you have a choice. There are now two different types of SSDs: SATA and PCIe. SATA is the type you’re probably most familiar with as it has been around for years and is used in PCs and laptops for hard drives and DVD drives. Most SATA SSDs are 2.5in wide as they’re designed to fit in laptops. But they’re also compatible with all recent PCs. So they are quite versatile yet so small and powerful!
Benchmarking Results
My results was the cheaper Apacer SSD was actually better then the SanDisk SSD Plus which has left me open mouthed and very surprised to find out that you don't need to have an expensive SSD if you are on a budget and looking for something just to use for your boot drive. What I advice you to do, look around and see what one has the best performance and reliability for your budget. You may even pick up a bargain in a sale? In my personal opinion, there is so many companies out there that make great, cheaper and in some cases better performing and more reliable SSD’s but because they maybe a newer company or from another market so many of these companies become over looked.
Look at this for example. A a newer company’s SSD from the Asian Market totally crushed the Sandisk SSD Plus 240gb, which happens to be made by Kingston! Kingston is one of the most reputable companies in the world so it goes to show we live in a market where we really do need to start shopping around and get the best for our hard earned money.
Thanks for reading
-Martin Luke