Is this a good drive?

Apparently Amazon has a really good deal going today on SSDs from Transcend. I know there's been some threads on SSDs here before, but does anyone know if these are decent drives?

No experience with them, and that price is pretty ordinary.

Cheers

Oh, "JMICRON JMF667H" controller.

Say no more.

So, not great?

And that's an ordinary price these days? Wow, I haven't been keeping an eye on the prices recently...

Well, fairly ordinary for a "weekly special" type of price. Slightly better than normal, perhaps, but not terribly unusual. I'm expecting that to become "the norm" over the next 2-3 months.

JMICRON gave early SSDs a bad name.
Their newer controllers are much better (eg. in some of the Kingston V-series drives), but given a choice I look for a Marvell controller.

Cheers

Thank you, sir! I'll keep an eye out for drives like that. That is certainly closer to the kind of price I'm hoping for with SSDs...

I bought one of these Crucial M500 960GB SATA CT960M500SSD1 during the previous downward price spike ($435).

Amazing to have so much room with an SSD drive!

Tip: camelcamelcamel can be useful for deciding whether to pull the trigger on a buy decision.

Oh heck yeah. I freaking love that site! But I keep forgetting to use it, so thanks for reminding me

What do you think of the Samsung MEX controller? Samsung's $600 1TB SSD is pretty tempting.

In all seriousness I'm curious why you're interested in larger SSDs. I'd prefer to save the cash by picking up a system drive for around $150 then spend another $150 for a 3-4TB disk drive for storing files.

Laptops typically accommodate only one hard drive. I have a pretty nice Sony Core i7 with 750GB spinning platter drive that's nearly full. This hard drive is a terrible bottleneck in an otherwise powerful machine. I'm waiting for a deal on a 1TB SSD to breathe new life into this thing.

Samsung drives seem to be the more reliable ones Apple has picked for their hardware. Most aftermarket Mac people have been using the 830 or newer 840 series Samsung drives without issues.


Doing any work on a hard drive seems slow to me now. I also rarely reboot, so a faster system drive is wasted.

All my laptops (work/home) are 100% SSD storage. The old Mac Pro has a 512GB SSD fused to a 3TB hard drive. Makes it much easier to work on the 750GB of HD video footage I still poke at, as well as having the rest of the storage feel pretty fast. I don't have to play file janitor, the system does it and keeps whatever data I'm working with on the SSD.

Photos, those definitely benefit from being on the SSD.

And games. Definitely want those on an SSD. I can tell who has an SSD and who has a hard drive when playing Starcraft online. A video from my WoW days showing SSD loading speed caused several people in my guild to go out and buy one.

Fair enough, those sound like good reasons. Especially the notebook aspect, I wasn't thinking about that, good point Rob.

Replacement drive for a laptop, or because I have limited space within my desktop (the video card blocks two of the six SATA connection on the mainboard) mostly.

I have an 120G SSD (OCZ Vertex I think?) that I used for a system drive. The speed from POST to useable desktop was awesome (something like 15 secs if you remove the time it took me to type in the password), but I spent a lot of time managing the drive itself. Since my desktop has two drives in the 500G-600G range (as well as the 120G), it would be an upgrade both in performance and in space.

I would (and have) pick the cheaper new Crucial M500 960GB SSDs over the Samsung any day. Much more durable flash chips in the M500, as well as a bank of power-fail capacitors to keep things sane.

TomsHardware had a good discussion/comparison last fall.
My 24/7 home office server now runs exclusively on a pair of them.

EDIT: But do note that the M500/960GB is a bit of a power hog. Better than most mechanical drives, but 3-4X the idle power consumption of the Samsung.

For those with laptops of a larger size (with optical), say 250GB SSD + replace the optical disk with a spinning disk?

I hardly ever use the optical drive in mine these days and have an external USB that I can use if necessary (although that requires me to actually bring it with me if out and about).

Because paying for speed is worth it:
(I'd been meaning to find this sooner, it's a great illustration of why I want the data I work with on an SSD, not just system files.)

Anand recently discovered that those power-fail capacitors don't do exactly what he/we thought they did, nor what the marketing materials claimed they did.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8528/micron-m600-128gb-256gb-1tb-ssd-review-nda-placeholder

Still a good idea, just not as good as previously believed.