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Saturday, May 18, 2013

My next computer build: Part 4 (Storage)

This was a tough one. After reading many reviews, including hundreds of customer comments at Newegg and multiple threads on various computing enthusiast forums, it came down to the Samsung 840 Pro, the OCZ Vector and the OCZ Vertex 4. These three, on balance, were neck and neck. Each had an abundance of glowing reviews, but I think most people leaned in favor of the 840 Pro and it was about $30 cheaper than the Vector. The 840 pro received the Editor's Choice Award from CDR Labs, Tweak Town, AnandTech and The SSD Review and those are just the ones I remember for sure.

I went ahead and pulled the trigger on purchasing the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD for $239.00 plus $6 shipping bringing my running total for this build up to $560 so far. So I'm passed the point of decision making and into the realm of justification. Also, with my record, it means I will probably stumble on a absolutely phenomenal sale within a week or two.

I always take all the exceedingly glowing conclusions with a grain of salt, but the actual benchmark numbers they published can't be ignored altogether and those were all pretty damn good for the 840 Pro.

The AnandTech review from September 24, 2012 had this to say about the Samsung 840 Pro:
The performance and power characteristics of Samsung's SSD 840 Pro are as close to perfect as we've seen from any drive this generation. In all but a handful of benchmarks, the 840 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we've ever tested. Even more important than its industry leading performance is the fact that the 840 Pro delivers great performance while remaining one of the lowest power SSDs to make it through our labs.
And The SSD Review seemed reasonably impressed as well and said this:
Examining performance with the 840 Pro is a bit amusing as it has hit so many firsts. To summarize, this is the list of ‘best scores’ that we have seen with the 840 Pro in this analysis:
  1. Top High Sequential Write Performance in Incompressible Data Testing;
  2. Top 512k Read and Write Performance in Incompressible Data Testing;
  3. Top 4k Read Performance in Incompressible Data Testing;
  4. Top 4k-QD32 Read and Write Performance in Incompressible Data Testing;
  5. Top AS SSD Total Score;
  6. Top AS SSD Copy Bench Results;
  7. Top Anvil Storage Utilities Total Score;
  8. Top Read and Write IOPS;
  9. Top PCMark Vantage Total Score
We could easily add to this by nit-picking at our results and digging out a few more firsts I am sure. A pertinent test result, however, is PCMark Vantage HDD Suite Total Scoring which brought in a result significantly higher than any other SSD we had tested.
Anyway, the SSD market is changing so fast it's hard to keep up with, but I'm reasonably confident the 840 Pro is going to replace the Samsung 830 as the standard go-to SSD for the near future and I'll have no regrets about this choice. I looked pretty hard for some bad reviews and just couldn't find any.

Now, the next thing to think about is if I need an HDD for user data to keep all that repetitive R/W from degrading my SSD and to store all those big music, video, photo and game files. The 1TB Velociraptor would do quite nicely except I've read it's a little noisy and some people say I just won't need an HDD at all unless I plan on going full tilt gamer. I don't and I already have an external 1TB Toshiba USB 3.0 drive that only has a few GB of stuff on it. Maybe I'm done.

I'll come back and edit if I change my mind or find something I just can't live without.

For now, it's back to scanning for Haswell and Z87 motherboard (the ASUS Maximus VI Hero looks interesting) news and keeping an eye out for an exceptional GPU deal.


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