SSD to get - 250 GB or so

[Lack]

I'm running a bit low on space on my Intel 160GB so I'm looking for a new SSD in the 250GB range.
Cant really wait for the new Intel drives to show up, so I'm kind of fuzzy what to choose right now.
Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB seems to get good reviews. Any competition to that?

Main use is running a couple virtualized system, so I guess random small block read/writes are most important.

 

[westrock2000]

One option to consider would be RAID'ing Sandforce based drives. Although we currently can't send TRIM specifically to a RAID array, as Anand showed, the Sandforce 1200 controllers have their own non-OS controlled garbage collection which allows them to clean up a RAIDed drive. Since Intel uses the TRIM command specifically to clean the NAND, RAIDing them is not really a practical solution yet.

This is incase you find some good price points for the SF-1200 based drives (OCZ Agility 2 / Vertex 2 / etc). Looking at the reviews, it looks like a Vertex 2 formats to ~110GB, so you would gain about 72GB over a formatted Intel 160GB (148GB NTFS).

EDIT: Anand did this with SF-1200 using the authorized firmware. There are some companies that ended up using the beta firmware because it was a little faster, but I have not heard about (verified) their garbage collection.

 

[Lack]

I can distribute my virtual machines among the drives so I don't think raid is necessary/will give any performance gains. Should I got with a couple smaller drives then? Which would you recommend? Maybe just add another intel drive?

 

[john4200]

The 256GB C300 is currently the best-performing SSD in that capacity.

The Sandforce is not really serious competition, since it has some poorly understood performance degradation issues. Unfortunately, Anand's tests on the SF resiliency is virtually worthless, since he uses HD Tach which basically writes a stream of zeros instead of realistic data.

Personally, I'd rather have a single, large SSD than the same capacity in multiple, smaller SSDs. The larger SSDs have better sequential write performance than the smaller models. But if you have a lot of parallel, large writes, the SUM of the write speeds of smaller SSDs would exceed that of a single large SSD. I'd rather not have the hassle of manually distributing the files, and I definitely would not RAID them and lose TRIM.

 

[Old Hippie]

The larger SSDs have better sequential write performance than the smaller models. But if you have a lot of parallel, large writes, the SUM of the write speeds of smaller SSDs would exceed that of a single large SSD.

They're ya have it in a nutshell.

Unless you want to get into the PCIe type SSDs you have little in the way of competition for a single 256GB SSD.

I'm using/trying/checking-out a Crucial RealSSD C300 and so far it seems to at least equal my Intel 80GB RAID0 drives in real world use.

256GB is way too big and I'd prefer a screaming 80GB boot drive but you just can't get the great performance without going RAID0 or a larger capacity drive......yet.

I'm sure the Crucial unit would suffice for your needs.

 

[Lack]

Running for example 10 virtual XP environments I think I'll have a lot more small read/writes then large dumps. Will one larger sized drive handle that better then a couple smaller ones divided among the virtual machines? No hassle in files distribution here.