Help with all these SSD's!

So, I'm finally considering building a new rig and I'm thinking I need a decent sized SSD.

But from the looks of it every company has one about the same read and write speeds. Who has the best one? Or should it be speed with the best price?

Looking for an 80-120gb.

Help fellas!

Sandforce based SSD's, they come in all different sizes...
OCZ Vertex 2
Muskin Callisto Deluxe
GSkill Phoenix Pro

Any of rhtose 3...make sure you get vertex 2 and not agility 2....callisto deluexe (not just callisto) and phoenix Pro (not just phoenix)....reason being is the others have a downgraded firmware and they're all nearly the same price, so get one of the 3 above.

I would go with the OCZ Vertex 2

So if you don't mind me asking, what are the differences between the agility and vertex 2

I personally heard they are exactly the same, but OCZ has "capped" off the speeds for the agility, so the agility has lower read/write speeds. Both are great choices though.

trueplaya4ever8 said:

So if you don't mind me asking, what are the differences between the agility and vertex 2

Click to expand...

Marshmallow64 said:

I personally heard they are exactly the same, but OCZ has "capped" off the speeds for the agility, so the agility has lower read/write speeds. Both are great choices though.

Click to expand...

this would be true if it were the agility 2 but maybe it is a mis-type in his post. the Agility vs Agility 2 are the controllers used on the ssd, also cache size/type. if you look at the agility2/vertex2 note the different sizes, there will be some vertex 2/agility 2 use on board ram cache. some others, you will have to look at size, will use nand flash for cache. yea the agility 2 vs vertex 2 is the limit put in place in the FW to limit read/write's or IOP's.

Opps I thought he meant agility 2 vs vertex 2.

The difference is in the firmware...(it's a long story....but here is my undestanding):
In the beginning there was two Sandforce chips, SF-1200 and SF-1500. The difference between the two was any drive using the SF-1500 had a large capactitor built in so in the event of a power failure, data that was already sent to the drive would be able to be written). This was an enterprise freature for servers.
The second difference was some (gets convoluted) SF-1200 chips were limited by firmware design to only write at a rate of 10,000 IOPS.

Much more better explained here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3661/understanding-sandforces-sf1200-sf1500-not-all-drives-are-equal

Now, since then sandfroce drives has been using the SF-1222 chip (this may be the second run of thier chips with the first run producing the SF-1200 and SF-1500 for the vertex LE drives). But I can't find where/when the SF-1222 came in and the SF-1200 went out. But from what I can gather there's no discernable difference, the difference in performance is all firmware.
*edit* the difference may also be the amount of over provisioning the controller has....I'm just guessing though.

There was a debacle over who could use what firmware and companies jumping the gun and selling non "release candidate or mass production" firmware. I have no idea the who what when where why or how companies determine which version of firmware each drive ships with now though. The cost difference between the drives is extremely small, so I always recommend getting the unrestricted firmware drives.

All that being said, here is the difference between 10k IOPS write limited firmware and the unrestricted firmware (i.e. Vertex 2 vs Agility 2)

Review of Vertex 2 and Agility 2:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3667/oczs-agility-2-reviewed-the-first-sf1200-with-mp-firmware/2

Marshmallow64 said:

Opps I thought he meant agility 2 vs vertex 2.

Click to expand...

That's actually what I meant. Sorry for the misunderstanding.