I'm currently looking for a SSD in my new computer and having a dilemma deciding between speed and reliability. I'm torn between the Intel 510 (reliable) and OCZ Vertex 3 (fast). Benchmarks show the Vertex 3 winning in most categories when it comes to speed, but it has received quite a lot of negative attention due to high failure rates. I'm leaning towards favoring reliability, but since I've got the impression the Vertex 3 is so much faster than the Intel during benchmarks, I'm wondering how this translates to real world usage and how much I would notice a difference. Tom's hardware states:
We're not saying that the performance of SSD isn't important (or impressive). However, as a technology, SSDs generally fall within a narrow performance spectrum. If you were to plot the speed of hard drives against solid-state drives, you would find that a low-end SSD performs about 85% faster than a hard drive. A high-end SSD only commands an 88% speed advantage.
If any context is needed to answer the question, I'll mostly be using the computer for programming (several instances of Visual Studio open) and web browsing (stretching the limit for how many tabs one can have open at the same time). I expect the random read stats for the SSDs to be the most important since compiling code will be one of the "toughest" tasks performed. Here, yet again, the Vertex outshines the Intel.
Are there any concrete numbers on how benchmark stats translate to the real world? I understand that the jump from a HDD to an SSD is huge, but what are the differences internally between the different SSDs? Basically, will I notice any difference between a "slow" SSD and a fast SSD?
