nkedel

I would expect the Intel to be under $500; probably around $460-$480 given the usual premium over competing drives. I have no word from anyone when they'll be in stock anywhere, and the 520-series 480gb drives are very hard to find and selling at a premium where you can still find them.

Giving that a few weeks if your not in a rush would be my suggestion, but I wouldn't bet on the Intel 530 480gb drives being easy to find even then -- they're not even showing as orderable/backordered on any of the sites I'm used to checking, and while I don't talk to our non-retail distributors directly, the purchasing guys who do indicate no definite ETA from their either.

Reluctantly, absent that option, I'd recommend the Samsung 840 Pro -- it's going to be the safest option on reliability (on a par with the Intels), and fairly performant. Should run about $440-460.

There are some fairly good options if you want the higher performance and are willing to take a little more reliability risk, but I can't come out and recommend them, while the Samsungs are super-reliable -- if not as fast as a $450 drive ought to be.

That said, I've swapped my main boot drive from the Samsung 840 Pro back to an OCZ Vertex 3, and am much happier with the real performance for work-related stuff, even though that's a 2011-vintage drive and has lower benchmarks.

If you're willing to accept a bit more risk, there are a number of very interesting newest generation drives; I can't recommend any of them outright for laptop use, but if aiming for reliability first the safest choice is probably the Seagate (either 600 or 600 Pro).

Landing Gear

Thanks! I have 22 GB free so I guess I can wait a little longer.

Here is a nasty review of the Seagate on Amazon. It seems like the writer must have bought one used.

nkedel

I saw that review; the author got a free one (probably early or pre-production) through the Amazon Vine program -- it's identified at the top of the review and in her text.

Unfortunately, drives crashing are a fact of any disk system. It's not super customer service to not honor warranty on free review units, but not entirely unjustified either.

In general, the newest crop of very fast drives (Corsair Neutron/Neutron GTX, Seagate 600/600 Pro, OCZ Vector) don't have a very long track record on the market to be sure of their reliability; we're using the Corsair Neutron GTX in server applications and are very happy with it so far, but we've had them up and running just less than a month at any scale, and servers don't get the power-failure and software crashes that laptops typically do, and which can corrupt data on SSDs with more sensitive controllers (as happened to me repeatedly with the older Crucial m4.)

The Corsair Neutron/Neutron GTX and the Seagate 600/600 Pro are all very similar drives; with Seagate, you get the brand name and larger company behind it (and while this is their first consumer market SSD, they've been selling enterprise drives for a couple of years.)

With Corsair, you get a much smaller company although of the enthusiast-market memory/SSD makers they have IME some of the most responsive customer service. MUCH better than OCZ, for one significant example.

Landing Gear

Email just received from Amazon referencing web page http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CKAOWB6/ :

What do you think?

Also, any further word/rumors/sightings on Intel?

nkedel

Pretty good price. We're really liking the Corsairs which we've been buying that use the same controller; the Seagate 600 (non-Pro) are basically the same as the slightly slower non-GTX Corsair Neutrons.

We can't get Intel 530 480gb drives from any of our distributors. I have absolutely no idea on when they'll become available, unfortunately.

The 240gb drives are readily available.

Landing Gear

What's the latest on the Intel 530 480gb?

nkedel

Appears to be a near-unicorn. Google shopping shows a few places I've never heard of with them, but no place reputable has got them as far as I can tell.

We've been continuing to use the Corsair Neutron GTX 480gb in a lot of demanding server applications, and so far are extremely pleased; we've started evaluating the (very similar, slightly pricier) Seagate 600 Pro 480gb as some folks in our IT organization have gotten a little antsy about using an "enthusiast market" drive.

On the desktop/laptop side. started rolling out the 530 240gb in the systems that get that size, and are still getting the Samsung 840 Pro -- which has been performing OK for most people, but we have seen some weird slowdowns when people fill them up heavily.

Landing Gear

What was the upside to Intel in announcing something that no one can buy?

nkedel

I assume there are OEMs using them, and who have first call. Dunno for sure, though, and the shortage of 480gb drives from Intel (except in their much pricier server-focused S3500 model) is going on a LONG time now.

I can't remember just how peak-performance driven you are, but the 512mb Samsung 840 EVO and the 480gb Crucial m500 are both good inexpensive large-capacity drives and appear to be quite reliable (the former in some testing of the 1TB size at my work, the latter in the 960gb size that is the secondary drive in my laptop.)

Both would appear to be underwhelming performers if you look at benchmarks, but both are better than the 500gb Samsung 840 (non-Pro) which was the least expensive option at that size before the Evo and m500 came out a few months ago.

I'm not really happy with any of the higher-end drive options right now, for general laptop use; I'm still using a two+ year old OCZ Vertex 3 480gb as my main drive and haven't seen any reason performance-wise to upgrade. It is noticeably faster than the Crucial m500 secondary drive for some compilation/build tasks. Other than that single part of my work, the "cheap" drive is fast enough I don't notice the difference.

Landing Gear

In response to your questions earlier, I said that "reliability" was first on my list of priorities. I know that you are familiar with names like OCZ and Crucial but I am not.

I'm running out of time to buy something and I see the price on the Seagate has dropped to $359 on Amazon. To paraphrase Jay Leno, "Buy or Don't Buy?"

nkedel

Crucial is the consumer brand of Micron, which is one of the biggest primary memory manufacturers in the world, along with Samsung and Intel (and Hynix, although they don't sell their SSDs on the consumer market very much.) They're very big and very safe, although I had qualms with the one-generation back Marvell controller.

OCZ and Corsair are both enthusiast product companies, and while they're big in that space, that's very different.

That said, Seagate or Samsung are both big, well-supported companies, just as Intel is.

Either buy, or buy this Samsung 840 EVO 500gb $339.

Neither one is a barn-burner, but both are solid drives from good manufacturers, and both are safer choices now (with a couple more months of time on the market) than they were a couple of months ago.

Landing Gear

Thanks as always for the advice.

I recall that last year you and others here gave me great advice on buying a laptop for my girlfriend which turned out to be a Lenovo at a great Thanksgiving weekend price.

Inasmuch as Black Friday is about two weeks away, do you and anyone else here think it's worth waiting? Are SSDs something that go on sale?

pseudoswede

The problem is if you're willing to stand in line or sit in front of a computer for deals. Resellers froth at the mouth for Black Friday/Cyber Monday items offered online. They have the means of picking up a lot of inventory very quickly--even if it's limited to just "1 per customer."

I picked up a nice (and highly-rated) 256GB Toshiba Q-Series SSD for $135 from Newegg a few weeks ago. No regrets not waiting for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Landing Gear

Waiting in line, no. Surfing the web, sure. I reflect back to last Thanksgiving when I bought my girlfriend the Lenovo at a good price from Frys without leaving the house.

I have a 256 GB Toshiba SSD now. That's what I need to replace for something bigger. While I'm not sure if this would pass nkedel's scrutiny it's been working fine for two and a half years. I think you got a great price.

My thoughts are that it is so close to the holiday that I may as well wait. This is a bit like someone who wanted an iPad recently waiting for the Air to come out, no?

nkedel

They go on and off sale all the time, and prices are generally pretty competitive. I don't think you're likely to see more than a $20-$30 spread on a $330-350 drive, and the really low-price deals are more likely to be on relatively less-well-known stuff (even when those are very big brands in other contexts, such as Toshiba/Sandisk/Hynix.)

$135 for 256gb is an exceptionally good price. Really, with the current-generation drives is is getting much harder to say that the individual drive performance matters. It's still a little too soon to say the same thing about reliability, but I am hopeful that these can start being treated as more of a commodity.