SSD Shootout: Six Blazing Fast Drives Tested

Top Solid State Drives available in India

One of the big bottlenecks remaining in PC hardware today is the storage sub-system, in other words the humble hard disk. The fastest processor can only wait while requested data is read or written to a hard disk drive with spinning magnetic platters. Thus the era of “Solid State Drives” (SSD) arose, where the data is stored on NAND flash memory technology. If this term sounded familiar to you, it is because you did hear about it – it is the same memory chips used in the USB pen drive you use every day. With a variety of advances in this area, it is now possible to use them as hard-drive replacements. The best part is they not only replace HDDs, but perform better.

An SSD can withstand small shocks (increasing reliability), is silent and does not heat up in operation, which is good for Home Theater PCs and high-end desktops. In comparison with today’s mainstream desktop HDDs that consume at least 5 Watts on average while operating, an SSD is capable of reducing power consumption to one-tenth or less, which brings it to consuming just milli-Watts! Not only desktops, laptops can take advantage of SSDs as well, to increase perceived system speed and squeeze the maximum out of the battery for more backup time.

Showcased below in no particular order, are six of the best solid state drives that PC World India has reviewed in the past.

Strontium Swift 64 GB - Read Review
Priced reasonably, performs very well and is available in India.

Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128 G - Read Review
Provides a little more storage space and yet is still affordable.

Intel X25-M 80 GB - B
This is the one that started it all, brought SSDs to the mass consumer market, and a lot of people would still like to benchmark their own SSD against the performance of the X25-M.

Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB
The best priced drive currently, and has great performance on offer.

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256 GB
Gigabytes are more than just a number, and this drive pitch-forks you into the high of owning an SSD which offers a comfortable amount of storage space.

Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB
As it stands, this is the big daddy of the world of consumer SSDs in terms of storage capacity – rivals the size of spinning desktop HDDs and offers enough and more space for data to breathe.

With their fast response times (almost instant) and read/write speeds, SSDs do make a huge difference to the speed of applications that frequently access the hard disk or have to load a number of files, since SSDs are essentially memory chips after all. That an SSD can improve system performance is established knowledge – see our comparison of SSD versus HDD for proof of the difference in numbers. Here's a chart with statistics for three performance characteristics, to enable you to size up all the SSDs mentioned above at a glance.

The downside is the price, since this is a segment of the market that has only recently started taking off. So manufacturers have products priced at different levels. The highest performance (and thus maximum price) is seen with SLC (single-level cell) drives. But the majority of consumer-level SSD products utilize MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, for lower cost. Even within MLC drives, there are slow drives at the lower-end, and faster ones at the high-end. The sweet-spot for you as a consumer will depend on your budget, but the sweetest buys currently are the fast and relatively good-capacity (128GB) drives. These seem to be priced to tempt and availability in India is not instant. But the few days of waiting in patience is a virtue, beyond the wait lies untold benefits!