Originally Posted by unmesh

Firmware quality/stability is more important than any specs in data sheets from the user experience point of view and the most well regarded vendors for SSD data integrity are Intel and Samsung. They have excellent toolkits for data migration and SSD monitoring and maintenance.

Originally Posted by unmesh

If your files tend to be incompressible (photos, movies, zip files etc), stay away from Sandforce controllers which do poorly with these. Intel's consumer line unfortunately uses these.

Originally Posted by nkedel

My personal use is very heavily incompressible data, and while Sandforce drives are nowhere near as blindingly fast as newer SSDs with incompressible data, the X201 isn't going to see 6gbps performance to begin with, and the present generation of Sandforce controllers with better flash can easily keep up with channel speed with incompressible data on a 3gbps channel.

The ones with cheaper, slower async flash (Intel 330, OCZ Agility 3, Corsair Force 3) will write compressible data measurably slower than wire speed, but unless you have another SSD you're copying from, the difference between a 150MB/sec and a 270MB/sec write speed is academic -- there are essentially no inputs on most machine that can provide data at the higher rate.

The Intel-firmware Sandforce (520, 330, 335 serieses) drives are currently the single most reliable consumer drives of the present generation in my experience, matched perhaps only by the Samsung 830s.

In practice, unless your workload is abusive, we're far enough into the firmware lifecycle of most current-generation controllers (although not all; LAMD's consumer controller and Indilynx Barefoot 3 are both quite new.)