Hard Drive Vs SSD – The space inbetween

There has been a rather large emphasis on SSD’s as of late. The big manufacturers like Intel, OCZ and Crucial have all been working hard releasing their new series of drives. Theses drives offer blistering performance using the relatively new SATA 6GB/s interface, but they also burn a heck of a whole in the end user’s wallet! Part of the reason for this high price tag could be down to the controller they use, or the fact that they expect the enthusiasts to pay ‘top dollar’ for the best performance.

With there being a rather large price difference between the high speed enthusiast SSD’s and the mid-range or low end SSD’s, we wanted to find out if there is any real benefit between the different SSD variants on the market. We are also trying to discover if there is a meaningful difference in speed between SSD’s from different generations. So in other words, we are asking the questions, how much money do we really need to spend on an SSD and is it worth upgrading to a newer one? To answer these questions, we will be using a mid-range SSD from Kingston, a previous generation ‘value’ SSD from Intel and a high end HDD from Samsung.

So how much of an SSD do we really need? Continue reading to find out!

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