Everyone loves a good graph, and our massive eight-drive test yielded data for miles. We’ve included benchmarks from the stock MacBook Pro hard disk and MacBook Air SSD for reference.
These bars represtent an average speed for 2-100MB blocks.
Click to embiggen.
See how fast the SSDs can read and write different-sized data blocks.
Scores, prices, capacities, and more for every drive in our test.
Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
If our scores seem particularly harsh, it’s because we feel the SSD market is almost too new to be wholeheartedly endorsed. It’s not just that the technology has problems--manufacturers are working hard to reduce the negative impact of the finite read/write cycles of memory blocks, for example--but also that the price per gigabyte is still a bit too high for an SSD to be an obvious purchase for many.
Still, SSDs do offer significant benefits in speed and robustness. Our test MacBook Pro really did feel much less sluggish with an SSD inside compared to a hard disk. Plus, it feels right having your data stored on a device that has no moving parts, draws less power, and runs completely silently.
But we need to pick a winner. Despite a high mark, mostly due to the handy bundle and low price, we recommend you don’t buy the Kingston 128GB SSDNow V-Series SATA2 2.5-inch Upgrade Kit. It’s the slowest drive we tested by an easy margin, and though it’s faster than a hard disk, it is, on average, only 2.3x faster across all our tests. Meanwhile, the drives from Crucial and Patriot, and the Transcend Ultra, are more than six times faster. You could buy the Kingston for the value and security that comes from solid-state storage, but there are better, faster drives here.
The Patriot Torqx is the very fastest drive in this test, but it’s also the most expensive. Ultimately, either it, the Transcend Ultra, OCZ Agility, or the drive from Crucial all performed well, so which you choose comes down largely to personal choice. OCZ has a reputation for innovation, but we have no strong feelings either way about Transcend or Patriot as manufacturers of SSDs.
Which leaves us with Crucial. Granted, it’s just a bare drive with no extras, and it’s right in the middle of the price range for this group, but we’ve come to trust the Crucial brand over the years as a company that makes top-quality products, ships them quickly, and offers rock-solid support. It’s also one of the very fastest drives tested here, so we’re happy to recommend it.
FineTunes
July 14, 2010 at 12:45am
OWC has other option to deterioration of write speeds see
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce
Also would like to see Apple support TRIM commands in OS X. Have a 256 gb SSD in my 2009 17" MBP and have no complaints so far about any deterioration in speed but worry as the free space on the SSD gets used.
Good article but would like to see an expanded article on options on maintaining SSDs.
thanks
chillin
June 14, 2010 at 12:33pm
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/14/apple_laying_groundwork_for_trim_support_in_future_ssd_based_macs.html
Do not use SSD with OS X unless it came with the Mac direct from Apple, and is covered by AppleCare, because within 6 months, without TRIM, that drive is as likely as not to be a brick. Bye bye expensive investment.
TRIM is of vital importance to SSD owners.
Phin, you are irresponsible for suggesting otherwise.
chillin
June 02, 2010 at 5:55pm
"If you shop around online, you’ll notice some newer, higher-priced offerings boasting features like TRIM-command support and 6Gbps SATA III connection speeds. And you might wonder why we didn’t test any of those. Simply put, those features mean nothing to Mac users. TRIM is a command used by Windows 7 and Linux 2.6.33 to manage “garbage collection” (wiping data blocks no longer in use) and speed up performance, but Mac OS X doesn’t use the TRIM command, so that’s a nonstarter."
You should do a little more research on TRIM before dismissing it. Just because it isn't yet supported in OS X (yet) doesn't mean that it means nothing to Mac users. In fact, it's arguable and valid to say that SSD without TRIM isn't worth it. The drives just won't last long enough for the investment to make sense.
