Over the past five years, CPU performance has hit new and unforeseen heights, and processors are increasingly spending time waiting on data from hard drives. This is what makes storage today's most glaring bottleneck. Overcoming it requires an SSD.
ZoomAs a point of comparison, a file operation completes 85% faster on a low-end SSD than it does on a high-end hard drive, but there is only an 88% speed difference between a high-end hard drive and a high-end SSD. That why you shouldn't let less aggressive benchmark results at the low-end deter you from making the switch. You don't have to have the best SSD to get great performance relative to a hard drive.
This hierarchy chart relies on information provided in our Storage Bench v1.0, as it ranks performance in a way that reflects average daily use for a consumer workload. This applies to gamers and home office users. The chart has been structured so that each tier represents a 10% difference in performance. Some rankings are educated guesses based on information from testing a model at a different capacity or a drive of similar architecture. As such, it is possible that an SSD may shift one tier once we actually get a chance to test it. Furthermore, SSDs within a tier are listed alphabetically.
There are several drives that we're going to intentionally leave out of our hierarchy list. Enterprise-oriented SLC- and 512 GB MLC-based SSDs are ignored due to the extreme price they command (and the difficult we have getting samples in from vendors). Furthermore, SSDs with a capacity lower than 60 GB are left off because of the budget nature of that price range.
| SSD Performance Hierarchy Chart | |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240 GB Patriot WildFire 240 GB Samsung 830 SSD 256 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND |
| Tier 2 | Adata S511 240 GB Corsair Force GT 240 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND |
| Tier 3 | Crucial m4 256 GB Intel SSD 510 250 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120 GB Patriot WildFire 120 GB Samsung 830 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND |
| Tier 4 | Corsair Force 3 240 GB OCZ Agility 3 240 GB Patriot Pyro 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 5 | Intel SSD 510 120 GB Crucial m4 128 GB |
| Tier 6 | Adata S511 120 GB Corsair Force GT 120 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 256 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND |
| Tier 7 | OCZ Agility 2 240 GB OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB |
| Tier 8 | Corsair Force 3 120 GB Intel SSD 320 300 GB OCZ Agility 3 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 120 GB Patriot Pyro 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 9 | Corsair Force 3 60 GB Crucial m4 64 GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 128 GB Intel SSD 320 160 GB OCZ Agility 3 60 GB Patriot Pyro 60 GB Other 60 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND |
| Tier 10 | Intel SSD 320 80 GB OCZ Agility 2 120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 60 GB Other 120 GB first-gen SandForce SSDs |
Do you transcode video, copy large amounts of data, or run your own Web server? If you consistently perform I/O-intensive tasks, SSDs are a great way to improve speed. But even if you only browse the Internet, SSDs still offer tangible benefits in performance and power. Take a look at the CPU utilization and power consumption results from one of our recent reviews:
A disk-based drive will always consume more power absolutely. At the system level, an SSD increases power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to increased I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data). But remember that an SSD-based configuration will always finish those operations faster. You see that reflected in the charts above. At the end of the day, an SSD lowers power consumption. This is why performance and power go hand-in-hand.
| PCMark Vantage (x64) HDD Suite | Average Power Rating (W) | Actual Power Used (mW) | Average CPU utilization (%) | Completion Time (mm:ss) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kingston SSDNow 100 V+ | 0.6 | 85 | 14.7 | 8:06 |
| OCZ Agility 2 | 1.4 | 186 | 10.9 | 7:54 |
| Intel X25-M | 1.4 | 242 | 10.8 | 10:17 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 Pro | 1.6 | 207 | 15.1 | 7:41 |
| OCZ Vertex 2 | 1.9 | 269 | 13.9 | 8:28 |
| Seagate Momentus 5400.6 | 2.2 | 426 | 10.4 | 11:40 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 | 2.3 | 305 | 15.1 | 7:50 |
| G.Skill SATA II FM-25S2S-64GB | 2.6 | 369 | 13.5 | 8:40 |
Best prices for tested products
Source: Tom's Hardware
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