Recommended 500GB SSD for T520?

[MikalE]

I'm shopping NewEgg for a 500 GB SSD for my new T520 and would like some recommendations as far as quality, price, and migration. I'd like to keep it under $200 if possible. The Samsung drive I'm looking at gets generally good reviews and is only $168.48.

I thought it would be as simple as using a rescue disc and pointing the OS to the Seagate backup drive and loading a recent backup and image, or just load a recent backup from the restore utility. Apparently from the reviews I read about the Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" 500GB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-75E500B/AM, it may not be as easy to load the drive as I thought.

I haven't looked at all 300+ drives available, but a reliable 500 GB SSD recommendation would be appreciated. This is my first SSD and I would like for this to go as smoothly as possible.

[ZaZ]

Saw this over on SlickDeals for $135 using coupon code AFSSD151014B. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I'm not sure about the migration, but failure rates for all SSDs are pretty low, so if you get a bad one, it probably comes down to dumb luck more than anything else.

[Johan]

If you are really, really serious about your data, and if you're at the same time on a limited budget (and who are not that?!), and if you because of the latter may need to make a potential compromise between price and performance (reliability), then I suggest you set up an automatic, scheduled backup-strategy... such that you are always able to retrieve your data and may worst-case not loose more than, say, one week.

SSD manufacturers of course strive after - and compete towards! - providing the highest capacity at the lowest cost, especially for us, cost-sensitive ordinary people. While I agree with ZaZ that a failing SSD may "probably" (my personal, unverified belief!) to some extent be more bad luck than poor quality, then there are still SSD's that have higher write-endurance than others. Personally I have mainly been using Intel SSD's and I have never suffered any data loss, but that's no warranty that it will never happen. I am also not certain that Intel will deliver most "bang for the buck" today, for ordinary people.

A couple of interesting threads (on this forum) for you to review may be SSD write endurance and The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead....

Ooh, by the way; remember that SSD's need to be partition-aligned to achieve highest performance/lowest wear, so if you clone (or restore an image from) a HDD, then the result may most likely not be partition-aligned. Therefore, if having the opportunity, it may often be the best way to install a new SSD by first formatting it, and then installing the operating system completely from scratch. This willl however require you to also install (or re-install!) all of your programs, printers, WLAN-devices, mess with a bunch og various settings etc. etc which may on the other hand be undesirable, from the perspective of the time all of this takes!

Anyhow, good luck with finding yuor new SSD!

Johan

[MikalE]

Saw this over on SlickDeals for $135 using coupon code AFSSD151014B. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I'm not sure about the migration, but failure rates for all SSDs are pretty low, so if you get a bad one, it probably comes down to dumb luck more than anything else.

I have that one on my Wish List over there. Thanks.

[MikalE]

Thanks for the link to the testing. That was very informative. Seems my first choice, the Samsung, seems to be the best among those tested.

I will probably purchase the Samsung.

Thanks for the help.

[MikalE]

I ordered the SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 500GB SSD from Amazon a bit ago. I've been watching Youtube videos on the incredible performance increase these drives provide.

Looking forward to it. Comes with migration software too.

I was going to buy this from NewEgg and had it in my cart yesterday for $155.95. I return this morning to check out and pay, and find that they jacked up the price to $179.95. Scheisters. I sent them an e-mail letting them know they lost a sale to Amazon and asking them if they always jacked up their prices on payday.

Amazon had it for $163 and free shipping.

[ajkula66]

Although I'd personally never buy an EVO - no TLC NAND in my house, ever - you should be fine presuming that you over-provision the drive and keep your workload light.

Happy upgrading.

[MikalE]

Would you explain your remarks?

I have heard, read, and watched nothing but high praise for these consumer drives. I see no downside, especially with a 500 GB and 2 TB conventional back-up drives.

[ajkula66]

Would you explain your remarks?

Simple enough, when it comes to NAND, SLC>MLC>TLC. No argument there.

I have heard, read, and watched nothing but high praise for these consumer drives. I see no downside, especially with a 500 GB and 2 TB conventional back-up drives.

While 850 EVO has not shown (yet) any of the slowdown problems that have plagued its predecessors - 840 and 840 EVO - it's simply not inexpensive enough for me to risk the possible future issues that might arise - no I don't trust Samsung - when MLC drives are just a few bucks more.

My SSD of choice nowadays is Sandisk Extreme Pro, with Micron M600 and OCZ Vector 150 as alternatives.

[MikalE]

Thanks for your explanation. I had to do some research, but now I understand the different storage formats that these types of drives use and the possible inherent error rates and failures.

I learned something today so it wasn't a total waste of a Saturday.

Thanks.

[MikalE]

The installation and data migration went very well, but for whatever reason I could not perform a system backup with an image. I was getting an error informing me there was not enough room on the partition. I found out this is more common than I thought.

I performed a clean installed and manually loaded all of my backup data and everything is again working as advertised.

The speed really is incredible. And the fan doesn't run very much at all.

The Windows Experience Index went to 5.9, while the drive results were 7.9, memory, 7.5, and processor 7.1. The bottleneck on the rating is the video only managing 6.8 for gaming, and 5.9 Aero.