Top Solid State Drives 2015

The high performance storage based on flash memory or better known as Solid State Drives (SSD) have come a long way. Gone are the days where we are limited to small capacity drives such 128GB or 256GB. We can now get huge SSDs from 500GB to 1TB.

The increasingly competitive SSD market, mass production and maturing technology also see of cost of SSD dropping over the years.

BestHighCapacitySolidStateDrives

What was once thought as impossible, a high capacity SSD that can match the size of its disc and spindle counterpart is now available. SSD drives are a great way to upgrade the performance of your machine be it a laptop of desktop. If you are still running on conventional Hard Disk Drive, you will see much improvement in moving to Solid State Drive. If anything, this is the only upgrade you laptop will ever need.

You can now find SSD at 1TB and 960GB (approximately 40GB short of 1TB) in the market. While there are only a handful of manufacturers offering these, we can see that there is increasing demand for them which can only be a good thing.

Benefits of Solid State Drives

The benefits are:

Faster boot-up and wake-up time
Faster application load time with RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND)
Faster read and write, moving and transferring files will be significantly faster with high I/O and throughput performance of up to 550MB/s
Consistently high performance with Native Write Acceleration
Lower power consumption and therefore better on the battery if you are running a laptop. Typically, SSDs are up to 95% more energy efficient and could translate to 50 minutes more battery life on mobile devices
Protection: provides four layers of defense against data corruption with mutistep data integrity algorithm
Secure: SSD supports AES 256-bit Hardware Encryption allowing you to encrypt the drive to keep your personal files and sensitive information secure.

Please note that some of the features listed here are manufacturer specific.

The Best 1TB and 960GB Solid State Drives in 2015

Here are the top 5 best high capacity SSD drives in the market right now.

SanDisk Extreme PRO 960GB
Crucial MX200 1TB
SanDisk Ultra II SDSSDHII-960G-G25 960GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
Crucial M500 CT960M500SSD1 960GB

Others

Samsung 850 EVO 1TB
Samsung 850 PRO 1TB
Crucial M550 ST1024M550SSD1 1TB

1TB and 960GB Performance Compared

While you can usually find users' average benchmark results based on reports from fitted Solid State Drives in real world applications and operating systems on sites such as UserBenchmark for SSDs with smaller capacity (up to 512GB), not many are available for those bigger than 512GB. We have to rely on manufacturer's reported performance for sequential read and write as well as random read and write.

				Sequential MB/s		Random	MB/s
Make & Model	Size	CML Rating		Read	Write	4K Read	4K Write
Samsung 850 PRO 1TB	1TB	5	BEST SEQ. R/W PAIR	550	520	100K IOPS	90K IOPS
SanDisk Extreme PRO	960GB	5		550	515	100K IOPS	90K IOPS
Crucial MX200 SSD	1TB	5	BEST SEQ. READ	555	500	100K	87K
SanDisk Ultra II	960GB	4.5		550	500	99K IOPS	83K IOPS
Samsung 850 EVO	1TB	4.5	BEST SEQ. WRITE	540	520	98K IOPS	90K IOPS
Samsung 840 EVO	1TB	4.5	BEST SEQ. WRITE	540	520	98K IOPS	90K IOPS

Please note that these are in no way a true reflection of the performance in 'real-world'. Often there are many factors such as processor speed, chipset, memory, operating system and type of application that decides the true performance of an SSD. But still, they are a good starting point in comparing between the SSDs in our line-up. The best overall performer is the Samsung 850 PRO 1TB followed by SanDisk Extreme PRO, Crucial MX200 SSD and SanDisk Ultra II. The Samsung 840 EVO and 850 EVO are on par.

Our Line-up

Here is a quick look at our line-up again. For the most up to date prices, please click on the links below:

Samsung 850 PRO 1TB
SanDisk Extreme PRO 960GB
Crucial MX200 1TB
SanDisk Ultra II 960GB
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB & Samsung 840 EVO 1TB

Others

Crucial M550 ST1024M550SSD1 1TB
Crucial BX100 SSD 1TB (SqR 535MB/s, SqW 450MB/s)
Crucial M500 CT960M500SSD1 960GB (SqR 500MB/s, SqW 400MB/s)
Crucial M550 ST1024M550SSD1 1TB

Cheap Alternatives – Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD)

These high capacity Solid State Drives don't come cheap. The conventional; spindle and disc based 2.5-inch hard disk drive is much cheaper per 1TB capacity. These SSDs cost 7 to 9 times more for the same capacity. Granted that they are a lot faster than the conventional drives, it is still a lot of money.

Luckily there is a middle ground. If you are after the high performance of SSD and still like the affordable and huge storage from the conventional disk drive, you could get a Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD). These are available at only a fraction of the price of a SSD. Here are a couple of 1TB SSHD in the market:

Seagate Momentus XT 1TB 2.5-inch SSHD
Toshiba PX3005E-1HJ0 1TB 2.5-inch SSHD

Both SSHD above comes with 8GB of Solid State Flash that provides boot-up and performance of a solid state drive couple with 1TB of storage space using the cost efficient hard disk drive giving you both performance and space without the cost of a full size SSD.

SSHDs are reported to be up to 3x faster than tranditional Hard Disk Drives. It uses a flash management and adaptive memory technology to monitor frequently used files and store these in the solid state memory for quicker read and write time.

It still applies the same SATA 6GB/s interace as the other SSDs above to take advantage of the fastest hard drive controllers out there. Users will see the benefits immediately in the faster boot up time, better performance in running multiple applications and better file I/O with read and write intensive applications that handles big files such as Photo and Video editors.