A few things to consider.

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.

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.

If you want to do your own detailed research, check out websites like anandtech, storagereview and hardocp.

Cheers.

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.)

So buy for now or buy for future?

SSD candidate: Samsung 840 Pro. Any negative experience?

On an X201, if you're expecting to keep it in that system long term and not move it to a faster machine, the speed advantage of the 840 Pro over the regular 840 is going to be lost and you're better off saving the money.

Overall, they're very good drives; I've got a 512gb 840 Pro (and an OCZ Vertex 3) in my laptop right now, and they're what my employer has been buying for laptops lately because of supply shortages on the Intel 520 480gb drives. We're probably not going back to the Intels; the Samsungs are faster.

My only complaint with the same Samsungs are a little on the pricy side, and they are a little worse than other models about lose write performance when they fill up completely (although using trim, and making sure you have some empty space, should keep this from being noticeable for most users. It's been problematic in DB servers.)

Once you go SSD you won't look back.

I upgraded my old laptop to SSD - it's only SATA2 (3gb/sec) but it's screaming fast. Best performance upgrade possible.

Additionally, my desktop has two 128 gb SSD's in a RAID0 for 256 gb w/ SATA3 at 6gb/sec. I had that running comfortably for well over a year until my power supply fried my motherboard.

Upgraded to a better power supply, newer motherboard and re-installed win7 64bit after upgrading the firmware on the SSD's (Crucial). Also upgraded my storage hard disk to a hybrid with a SSD cache. System is fast.

-SDF

Just got back from computer store with this:

Samsung 840 SSD 500 GB MZ-7TD500BW

Going offline to do the cloning. Thanks for everyone's input.

OP said his laptop came with an HDD and he wants to change to an SSD. Does this mean that he will have to adjust some settings on the laptop? If so, which one?

Could you explain this a bit? I don't know what Sandforce is.

What do you think of a) the new Seagate-branded SSDs; and b) the Toshiba OEM SSDs?

And
I am back,
verified the clone,
replace HDD with cloned SSD,
booted up and tested a Photoshop file.

No scientific stopwatch test but it felt quite a bit faster on boot and PS file loading; I would guess half to one third the time it tooked before with the HDD

The cloning software did it all automatically. Including partitioning just like the original HDD with Lenovo recovery and boot partitions set up and hidden. I did not have to make any setting changes.

If Windows 7, it SHOULD be automatic, but it can't hurt to verify them manually. Actually, since he got a Samsung, downloading the "Samsung SSD Magician" (there may be a CD copy in the box he can use, but a retail CD is probably out of date) and running the OS optimization, it will do three of the major ones for you:
- disable SuperFetch
- disable ReadyBoost
- make sure Defrag isn't running

It also suggests disabling the Indexing service, which I can't recommend. Intel has a slightly different set of recommendations, and their SSD toolbox app will check them.

It's also important to make sure the system's SATA controller is in "AHCI" (or "RAID" or "IRRT") mode, rather than "Legacy" (sometimes labeled ATA or IDE.) Switching this is non-trivial, but it's generally necessary to get Trim working.

Sandforce is one of the manufacturers makes the controller chips that run inside of SSDs made by other companies (they're owned by LSI, now, but still have their own branding.)

Marvell and LAMD (Link-A-Media) are the two other major manufacturers who sell controllers.

Intel uses a mix of their own controllers (just on enterprise drives these days) and Sandforce.

Samsung makes and uses their own controllers. I don't think they've ever sold controllers separately, but they've been known to sell whole drives to other companies to resell under their own brands.

OCZ owns Indilynx and uses a mix of their own Indilynx controllers, Marvell controllers (often with a misleading Indilynx label) and Sandforce controllers.

The reviews are very good, but they're very new. They use a relatively mature controller from LAMD, and we've had good luck with the Corsair Neutron which uses the same controller, but the deployment of those I have is TINY (10, all in the same server) compared to some of the other drive models and controllers.

Which ones?

We've had some pretty good luck with some much older Toshibas -- 1.8" drives for the T400s and T410s were hard to find except for the really slow older Intels -- but I've got no idea whose controller they are. They've been reliable, but we didn't got to "SSDs for everyone" in that generation or even with the T420s so the number we deployed compared to newer drives is relatively small.

On a quick google, it looks like at least some of their newer drives use their own controller. I can't find a review on Anandtech which generally has the most comprehensive reviews of non-enterprise SSDs, but there are some relatively positive reviews on more minor sites.

--

Honestly, unless people have a very specific workload, performance differences between the slowest current-generation SSDs (the Intel 330, OCZ Agility 3 on async flash) and the fastest (OCZ Vector and Vertex 4, Samsung 840, plus various Toggle flash Sandforce drives) will not be noticeable to most people. I'd buy on a balance of price/reliability, entirely ignoring performance.

If you have very specific workloads, knowing which controller is best for your workload is more important than the raw performance numbers, although I'd stick to sync or toggle NAND rather than async if write speed is a potential issue... the cost differences are generally quite small.

Nice! Always a good thing when things work easily the way they should.

One thing I've never been clear about is whether you get more than the rated capacity if your data is highly compressible. I'm guessing not since the partition creation will preclude that.

This review shows that the write performance deteriorates with time though less at the 500GB capacity than at smaller ones.

http://hardocp.com/article/2013/01/0...8#.UbQTY_nvuDk

In general, steady state performance of SSDs is not specified by the vendors and not always commented upon in reviews.

No, the compression does not help capacity. It helps write-speed, and even more so, write endurance -- with heavily compressible data, Sandforce drives are the only ones which can have a fractional write-amplification factor, which in certain applications (writing a lot of text-heavy data, for one example) means they can potentially last a whole lot longer.

Similarly, if adds effective spare capacity -- which means a drive which is say, half full with heavily-compressible data like a lot of applications, or text documents -- won't see the "I'm full" slowdown to nearly the same degree as some other drives/models.



Anandtech has gotten very good at testing the full-drive performance case; I'd encourage those concerned to look at those reviews.

That said, if you don't know why your use case needs extremely performance relative to other SSDs, it's probably not a big enough difference to worry about -- these will still outperform disks in most cases (or at least match them, in certain write-heavy workloads which is the one area where they don't always outperform especially when full.) Use TRIM, and make sure to leave at least, say, 10gb free space (5-10% is better) and don't worry about it.

Really, this is rather like the concerns coworkers had when we first rolled out SSDs at work 4 1/2 years ago -- quite a number of them read about SSDs, and started doing weird things to extend the lifetime of their SSDs, many of which limited the benefit they got speed-wise or convenience-wise. None of which made sense, because:
* The SSDs were corporate-owned. If they ran out of write-lifetime in work use, they'd just get replaced. You didn't get to keep them after, and if you did, they'd be so obsolete you wouldn't want them as a system drive... I mean, I'd take a 160GB X25M-G2 -- I think we might even have a few G1s out there -- if we started throwing them out, but it would be to stick it in an enclosure and use it instead of a USB stick as a durable carry-around...
* There was absolutely no chance that a developer would run out of write-lifetime in the course of our 3 year refresh cycle.

We saw some drive failures, for sure, but every single one has been a catastrophic controller failure ("bricked drive") and not running out of writes.

This is what was inside my Sony, the one with which I have been having all the service problems mentioned in other threads: http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...oid=2000055122

I've heard that Toshiba makes OEM SSDs for a number of companies including Apple. True?

although the x201 doesn't support it, if you are getting a Lenovo to replace that one in time, i would look into an mSATA card. it goes in your WAN slot and is an SSD, and you can still have a mechanical HDD (or SSD) in the main bay for storage and put your OS on the mSATA.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...view,3449.html

also, i would not keep the SSD too full as it can shorten the life over time. here is an SSD guide, that is pretty typical, in the first link of this forum post, but i agree with the second posters changes to the guide (which are significant). but you should be aware of the falsities out there as well.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St...rs/td-p/104886

and a fresh install is always best, although not as fun as a clone, but enjoy your SSD it can revive an old system for sure.

i would always always recommend an offsite backup of your important files. an external drive is not a backup plan (as stated here). i like spideroak but there are many cloud providers.