4-Way SSD Round-Up Redux: OCZ, Corsair, PhotoFast

Performance Summary: The OCZ Vertex Turbo Series and Photofast G-Monster V5 proved to be the highest performing drives in the group represented in this article. The G-Monster in particular offered strong performance in the ATTO, HD Tach, and SANDRA tests, where its read and especially write speeds were consistently highest and top notch of the bunch. We should also point out that the Vertex Turbo Series drive's faster cache gave it a marked edge over the standard Vertex drive, and while the Corsair P64 generally trailed the others, it surged ahead in the PCMark Vantage tests and offered strong performance overall.

In the conclusion to one of our previous 4-way SSD round-ups, we said: "While Solid State Drives are becoming more and more mainstream with each passing day, they are still much more expensive than traditional hard drives and offer much smaller capacities. As such, price is an important consideration and a significant differentiating factor with the current crop of SSDs. While fast, high capacity hard drives like Western Digital's 1TB Caviar Black hard drive can be had for under $100, or about $.10 per gigabyte, solid state drives currently command a few dollars per gigabyte." That statement of course remains true today.

We have the current prices for the four solid state drives we've featured here outlined in the chart above. As you can see, the Photofast G-Monster V5 is the most expensive overall, its cost per gigabyte is the highest, and it has the largest capacity, but it was also the highest performing SSD in general. The Corsair P64 is the least expensive overall and comes in second in the price per gigabyte category. OCZ's Vertex Series SSD is the second least expensive drive overall, but has the lowest cost per gigabyte, and the OCZ Vertex Turbo Series SSD falls right in between the standard Vertex drive and the G-Monster.

So, according to current pricing, the Corsair and Vertex Series drives are the most economical per gigabyte followed by the Vertex Turbo and then the G-Monster V5. If we factor performance into the equation, the trend remains largely unchanged--the fastest drive in this article overall was also the most expensive and the lowest performing drive was the least expensive, at least in terms of overall pricing.

In the end, all of the SSDs featured in this article will be a significant step-up in performance over a traditional, spinning platter-based hard drive and potential consumers should weigh their capacity needs against their budget carefully. Choosing between four solid products like these can be difficult.  Ultimately though, overall performance weighs heavily in our opinion, but we can't ignore the value proposition. Hence, we're giving the OCZ Vertex Turbo Series drive a strong recommendation---our Editor's Choice Award has gone to Intel's X25-M. But we also recommend and approve of the other drives as well, and think that most users would ultimately be pleased by the performance of any of the candidates represented here.