Part of Gold Box Deal of the Day: Up to 50% Off Select PC Components and Peripherals
Seems very cheap 51% off - According to CamelCamelCamel lowest price ever on Amazon.
Cheapest on Static Ice is $377.
Conversion using XE
CamelCamelCamel.
Well this one is extra quiet
Its much faster according to reviews:
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/SanDisk-Extreme-II-240G…
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7006/sandisk-extreme-ii-review…
It is one of the fastest SSDs out now but unlike the M500, you don't get as much reserve NAND and you don't get power-failure protection.
Also, I can tell you having used 5 SSDs from OCZ, Crucial, Samsung, Intel and SanDisk, that the differences in boot times, application load times and file copy times (i.e. what most people care about) are as near as makes no difference between the leading brands right now.
In fact the most sorely overlooked aspect of SSD performance and one that can easily make more difference than the SSD itself is the motherboard you will be using it with, as the storage controllers, chipset drivers and available bandwidth (particularly on budget motherboards) can make a huge difference to performance along with your actual usage habits on the SSD (Pagefiles, Volume Shadow Copies, Temp file/Cache locations, Indexing, etc.)
Even BIOS updates and Chipset driver updates can lead to big leaps in boot times. I went from 18 seconds to 12 seconds after a recent BIOS update.
That being said, anyone going from a mechanical 7200RPM HDD to an SSD or from a +2 year old SSD to a new SSD will see gains across the board, period.
The motherboard BIOS and chipset (for SATA3) can make a big difference in the boot up speed. In fact, a simpler motherboard can often boot up a lot faster. All those deluxe or premium boards come with extra SATA3 ports, network ports, other ports - they all need extra time to detect / load during bootup.
My i7 (with a board that has more ports/features) boots slower than my i5 (which uses a basic board). i5 can boot Win7 around 7 seconds with a Sandisk SSD. However, Win8 implements fast boot so boot up time is less of an issue nowadays (but then the BIOS delay is more obvious).
My usage pattern requires a lot of data writes, so I still need large 7200rpm hard drives. Operating system and application loading definitely improves by a huge margin with an SSD.
One difference between Sandisk Extreme II vs Crucial m500 which might matter to you is that Sandisk comes with 5 year warranty vs 3 years for m500.
In fact, a simpler motherboard can often boot up a lot faster. All those deluxe or premium boards come with extra SATA3 ports, network ports, other ports - they all need extra time to detect / load during bootup.
Good point indeed.
(but then the BIOS delay is more obvious).
That's exactly the case for me. Loading the OS itself takes about 5-6 seconds (from Starting Windows to seeing my desktop). The other 7 or 8 seconds are spent by the BIOS detecting and re-detecting everything a billion times and doing POST.
The fact of the matter is, most users will not achieve the benchmarks seen in reviews. They'll be limited by some other aspect of their hardware or even software configuration, well before the limitations of the SSD or the interface are reached.
None of that mattered with HDDs which were just so comparatively slow that all the blame could be laid squarely on them, but with SSDs being as fast as they are, everything else is starting to show it's age/lack of improvement (like the BIOS).
I don't need one just yet, but so tempted!
It would be a good replacement for my 180GB Intel 520. Though I don't have problems with space on my 180GB. My money just doesn't want to stick with me.
The extreme isn't much better than the ultra plus but 480 at 26x is going to be the price level in the end of the year.
I agree the main board hardware counts a lot, updated driver and firmware does help.
international warranty? If it dies does it have to go back to the states?
Yes.
hmm now says $296 USD, must've missed it
is more expensive than the Crucial M500
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-adapter-Internal-CT48…
not sure you'd see any extra performance.
Plus what the hell is
Noise reduction for quiet drive operation
on an SSD ?