Best 120/60 gb SSD for under $200/100

Looking to purchase an ssd soon. Thinking a 120gb would probably be best for full Win7 64bit OS and a few programs.
I'm really liking the Corsair Force 3.

Any suggestions?

The Corsair Force 3 is a Sandforce drive. Sandforce seems to be having serious compatibility issues with Sandy Bridge - Intel chipsets. You might want to check the Corsair Forum first to see if the F3 will work on your mobo. The same can be said for OCZ's Agility 3, Solid 3 and Vertex 3. All these are Sandforce drives.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/forumdisplay.php?f=188

Well my SATA6gb controller is a Marvell 9128 which I hear is limited to ~400mb/s.
Ugh.

You will not get max SATA3 speeds with that thing. Read this. The second paragraph tells it all.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-vertex-3-pro-review/13

Wow what garbage...
Might as well get a SATA 3gb drive or keep my mechanical drive.

Oh ouch on that review. Is there any other reviews pertaining to SSD's and that controller that anyone has run across?


Crucial M4 64/128Gig drive. Little over the price you had but you can find deals close to those amounts. These don't do the compression like the SF based controllers do. Just wanted it to be mentioned at least if considering. I'd still suggest a SATA III drive if considering it, while you might not get max performance oout of it, its still even in that case over 120-150Megs faster (50%+) than a SATA II drive.

My M4 64GB can make up to 470/115 MB/s on AMD board so it's much more than declared by Crucial but it's making no more than 350MB/s on any Marvell controller the same as SF drives. New Marvells are a bit better but not much.
Some Guru3D tests are a joke like testing SATA3 controllers with SATA2 SSD in mobo reviews but that's other topic ...
If you look on pcmark results then these M4 drives are really good and often are better than SF. Maybe can't beat Vertex 3 but there are no problems with stability/compatibility ( well except some macs but it's apple problem and who cares ).
Now price of SATA2 and SATA3 SSD is almost the same and its better to go with SATA3 at least for better random transfers.
My pick will be M4 128GB for daily system. If you look for benching SSD then can try Vertex3/Corsair GT but you will risk unstable system for longer runs ( more on OCZ/Corsair forums ).

Running a sandforce OCZ vertex2 60GB SATA2 with NO problems on Sandy Bridge P67. Three months old, still shows 100% life... Haven't heard about these issues... But would def. Recommend SATA3

Just for the fun of it. Here's the AS SSD bench of my V3 MIOPS on an AMD system.



If it works on your system the V3 is awesome. And I just found out that the price of the V3 MIOPS has dropped by about $60 since I bought mine 3 months ago. Time to get another one for RAID0?

SeanDude05 said:

Running a sandforce OCZ vertex2 60GB SATA2 with NO problems on Sandy Bridge P67. Three months old, still shows 100% life... Haven't heard about these issues... But would def. Recommend SATA3

Click to expand...

Yep, Vertex2 is fine , there are problems with SATA3/SF series. I have Corsair F60 that is almost the same as Vertex 2 and I never had any problems with it.