I'm still with normal HDD. Hope to upgrade some days. If I had to choose, I would choose Samsung one.
In general I recommend the Samsung 850 Pro, it has a TBW of 150 (that means you can write 150TB on it), it's fast and it has 10 year warranty.
Hold out for a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD like the Samsung 950 Pro Samsungs are the best SSD's on the market right now - but that being said here's what to keep in mind: 1. If you don't have an M.2 PCIe 3.0x4 slot on your motherboard, the max read / write capacity of SATA III is 500Mb/sec - end of story. Your bus will definitely limit your performance, so don't spend more than it takes to get there. 2. Don't bother with an SSD that's only 256Gb, when the prices for 500Gb drives are dropping quickly. 3. If you want the BEST performance, and don't want to be mad later because you wasted cash on outdated tech, wait a while until the prices come down for PCIe NVMe SSD's like the Samsung 950 Pro series, which are reported to be 1000x faster than NAND based SSDs. They link directly to your PCIe bus using 4 channels which is a super wide data path for a hard drive. The biggest catch is that you'll need a skylake based platform to use one, because currently the Z170 chipset series is the only widely marketed series to take advantage of the new tech. If you haven't bought a motherboard yet, and are thinking about upgrading to skylake - future proof your system by double checking the motherboard's M.2 slot to make sure it can handle a 110mm long drive, not the more common 80mm max lots of manufacturers are using. You can also get M.2 format SATA drives for those slots, but they're still capped at SATA speeds, so it would be kind of a waste of performance. Right now a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD runs about $330 give or take, and the same capacity 850 Pro SATA SSD is $173, so it's literally twice as nice, but twice the price. lol.. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/950-pro-review-samsungs-first-pcie-m-2-nvme-ssd-is-an-absolute-monster/ arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/02/understanding-m-2-the-interface-that-will-speed-up-your-next-ssd/ I hope this info is at least a little bit helpful, even though I didn't really answer your question about cheap SSD performance drives. Just so I'm not avoiding it completely, in the economy performance SSD category, I'd stick with a Crucial MX200 series drive like this one: amazon.com/gp/product/B00IRRDHUI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00IRRDHUI&linkCode=as2&linkId=CNHY3F2NXDOOQ2QB Sorry I couldn't use actual links - my noob status lingers on. Regards, Wissper
If you are going to run only on the sata port, then an 850 is good. The 850 Pro does have a better warranty but for the cost you won't know the difference in speed. I recently installed an OCZ Trion 150 SSD. It doesn't claim to be faster than the Samsung drives but I was impressed with it, and it was about $20. cheaper
wait few months for INTEL® OPTANE much more performance difference ssd vs pcie-ssd difference is 10x less then pcie-ssd vs optane
Not many systems can go as fast as the disks in theory could go, when it's about fast than the whole machine has to be higher than high end.
But that would need require newer boards from Intel, possibly Kaby Lake and later, right? I think intel 750 SSD & Samsung 950 Pro are beasts ruling the consumer and prosumer markets interms of RAW read/write speeds. For gaming though, you wouldn't notice any difference. So, buy Samsung 850 Pro drive and save a lot for next major upgrades.