Hard Drive Vs SSD – The space inbetween

Final ThoughtsThe purpose of today’s review was not only to discover whether there is a significant performance difference between storage drives that have different price tags, capacities and target audiences, but we also wanted to see if it is worthwhile upgrading from a last generation SSD to a newer generation SSD. Another question that we wanted to try to answer is, can we buy ‘too much’ of an SSD for a particular system?

Firstly, let’s comment on the only HDD tested today, the 1TB Samsung HD103SJ. The drive showed good read and write speeds which are about as fast as it gets for current mechanical hard drives. The PCMark Vantage score was low and got smashed by the two opposing SSDs. It definitely had one thing that today’s other 2 drives didn’t though, storage. Offering 1TB of storage for less than the RRP of the Kingston and Intel SSDs, we can clearly see where this drive excels.

Next let’s talk about the 128GB Kingston SSDnow V100. The drive made a flying start in the benchmarks with untouchable read/write speeds. The sequential speeds were clearly where this drive excelled, but the average speeds were not as great as we anticipated. This could be due to a bottleneck in our test system of course, but then again this is part of the review and the test system was the same for each device. The PCMark vantage score was also lower than we expected with this drive losing to the Intel drive by a wide margin. Maybe the high sequential speeds of Kingston’s SSDnow V100 will make it an excellent candidate for a storage or transfer drive when those sequential speeds are really exploited. At the moment, it is quite hard to recommend the V100 as an OS drive for a mainstream system such as our test system.

Last but not least, we move onto the 40GB Intel X25-V. We were very impressed with this little ‘value’ drive throughout testing. The drive not only delivered its rated speeds, but also surpassed them in a number of benchmarks. The write speeds are very low, but this isn’t a major issue with an OS drive. The PCMark Vantage score was excellent and managed to thrust the X25-V into pole position, for PCMark Vantage results at least. This drive isn’t perfect though. The fact that it only sells with a 40GB capacity is going to turn a lot of people off instantly. The low write speeds may be an issue to some users who have plans to use this drive as something other than an OS drive. The aesthetics may not be to some people’s taste which could quite easily turn them off when purchasing an SSD.

So what do we recommend and for who?

Well firstly we recommend the Samsung HD103SJ to anybody looking to build a basic PC that doesn’t need to be super fast but has to stick within a budget. It offers tremendous storage capacities, decent speed and a very low price tag. We also have to remind you that the results that it showed today were excellent considering this drive is a mechanical Hard Disk Drive.

Secondly, we recommend the Kingston SSDnow V100 range of drives to somebody looking to make their first journey to the SSD bandwagon or somebody who wants to store more than just the OS on their SSD. The drive retails just above the amazing £1/GB mark, it offers extremely high sequential read/write speeds, very high average read/write speeds and PCMark Vantage performance that is over 4 times as fast as a HDD. We must emphasise the point that this drive is a very good contender, but maybe it is a little too fast for our mainstream test system and therefore we would recommend this to anybody with a fairly high end PC looking to buy an SSD but not break the bank. There is a variety of capacities to choose from and we have no doubt that performance will be better when coupled with better hardware.

Lastly, we would recommend the Intel X25-V to anybody who is looking for a fast performing SSD which doesn’t need a huge capacity. We would also like to point out that anybody who owns this drive and thinks it may need an upgrade due to faster drives being released, there may not be as much of a performance increase as expected when buying a new SSD. The X25-V showed pleasing read speeds throughout and delivered excellent PCMark Vantage performance. Couple that with a low retail price, and it makes a great choice for anybody looking for a cheap but effective upgrade!

While all drives today showed good results for their respective retails prices and target audience, the drive that really shone in our eyes and that we would recommend for a mainstream PC like our test system was the Intel X25-V 40GB. The results may not look overly impressive, but we have to try and remember that this SSD is over a year and a half old. That is a very, very long time in the technology world. It delivers pleasing read speeds and the PCMark Vantage score is also very impressive. The write speeds are poor, but considering this drive’s main purpose is as an OS drive, this isn’t such a terrible thing.