Find the best SSD for your PC

[Brink]

Want to build or upgrade a PC and you're looking for the best SSD? Read on.

Hard disk drives (HDDs) are old-school, so if you want the best performance possible you need to be looking at a solid state drive (SSD). But given that there are plethora of manufacturers out there all claiming to offer the best, it can be hard to find the best drive.

One way to find which is the best SSD is to wade through reams of online documentation from the manufacturers, and compile a list, and then pick what comes out top. Problem is, lab benchmarking is very different from real-world benchmarking, and they can give a better indication of how the hardware will perform.

How it's not possible for someone who wants to buy an SSD to go out and benchmark dozens of drives, but fortunately that heavy lifting has been done by UserBenchmark. The site offers a freeware PC speed test tool and has collected data on over 600,000 different SSDs (the site also has information on PCs, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, HDDs, and external drives), and has compiled this data into easy-to-use charts.

The site allows you to sort out the SSDs by a number of categories, including read/write speeds, effective speed, and market share.

I'm interested in effective speed, which is a measure of how well an SSD performs when subjected to typical consumer workloads.

So which drives come out on top? Here's the current top 10 lineup:

Read more: Find the best SSD for your PC | ZDNet

 

[Cr00zng]

All one needs to know is that seven of the top 10 SSDs are made by Samsung. Seemingly, there's no reason to even entertain the thought of getting different brand.

And then you add Samsung Magician for some awe:



Then you realize that while the numbers are great, the actual performance of the system isn't much better than without the Magician, if any...

 

[margrave]

Seven of the top ten are Samsung?
Stop counting the same model multiple times, and Samsung is two of the top five.
- Samsung 850 Pro
- Samsung 850 Evo
- Plextor M6V
- Intel 730 Series
- OCZ Vector
- Crucial M550

 

[Cr00zng]

UserBenchmark is a moving target, the top five brands are currently:

• Samsung 850 Pro
• Samsung 850 EVO
• Kingston HyperX Savage
• Sandisk Ultra II
• Intel 535 Series

Size does matter for SSDs, the larger SSDs tend to have better performance. At least for SSDs other than Samsung. When a 128GBs Samsung SSD outperforms a 240GBs non-Samsung SSD, it should be in the top five...

 

[Indianatone]

I have several brands, 3 of our PC's have Toshiba THNSNH256BST 256 Gb drives, 4 machines have Kingston SV300S37A120G 120Gb drives and 2 laptops have Crucial M500 240 Gb SSD. The main machines are SATA 3 6Gb and the others are a mix of SATA 2 and 3 devices. Frankly cannot tell the difference in any of them as the machines are all so responsive apart from the Asus 1015 EEPC Netbook which cannot execute the data it reads fast enough as Windows 7 is too much for it even with 2 Gb of ram. On that EEPC machine an ssd makes it appear to operate like a machine with a spinning disk drive. I did try a couple of Samsung SSD a few years back and had nothing but issues so settled on Toshiba, Kingston and Crucial and on my main rig 32Gb of 2400Mhz GSkill ram helps a lot too.

 

[AddRAM]

All one needs to know is that seven of the top 10 SSDs are made by Samsung. Seemingly, there's no reason to even entertain the thought of getting different brand.

And then you add Samsung Magician for some awe:

View attachment 383746

Then you realize that while the numbers are great, the actual performance of the system isn't much better than without the Magician, if any...

Absolutely agree

SSD 850 PRO 2.5” SATA III MZ-7KE256BW | Memory & Storage

SSD 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 250GB | Samsung Solid State Drives

And now they finally sell the 950 on their site

SSD 950 PRO NVMe 256GB

 

[whs]

I think any SSD is faster than a spinner. I have Ocz, Kingston, Intel, and Crucial and they all work well. No complaints here.

 

[Swizz]

I have had the Samsung 850 Pro since early since 2013 and I can not recommend it enough. *two thumbs up*

 

[Brds7t7]

I have had the Samsung 850 Pro since early since 2013 and I can not recommend it enough. *two thumbs up*

+1 for the Samsung SSD's. For the price they are great value.

 

[Benteke]

I have had the Samsung 850 Pro since early since 2013 and I can not recommend it enough. *two thumbs up*

Just purchased one.... cant wait to install it!