500GB Samsung 840 Series 2.5" SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive SSD (MZ-7TD500BW) $280 + Free Shipping

Quote from 5thElement : TLC memory. Stay away.

There's always a reason to buy the next best upgrade. Better yet than simply staying away from TLC, why don't we start an endless loop of "Don't buy now, wait until the new ones come out next year!"?

My Intel 320 series 120GB boot drive has been going strong for over a year now, and I highly doubt I would notice a difference between SATA2 and SATA3 in real world performance, but when I got this drive, the hoi polloi were yelling then too, "Don't get SATA2, wait for SATA3!"

No thanks.

Quote from 5thElement : TLC memory. Stay away.

You do that while others just enjoy theirs. I know I do since I have one running in my machine right now.

Mac Mall - $ 279.99 + cashback site (from 2% to 5%)
http://www.macmall.com/p/Samsung-...8cea31fb14

I got this when it first "dropped" to $300... I'm not even missing that $20

Quote from 5thElement : TLC memory. Stay away.

Yes, if you need this drive to last 10 years. Otherwise ignore this advice and partake in the splendor. For me? Time to research the real life difference of 840's and 840's pro.

Quote from caseyfriday : There's always a reason to buy the next best upgrade. Better yet than simply staying away from TLC, why don't we start an endless loop of "Don't buy now, wait until the new ones come out next year!"? My Intel 320 series 120GB boot drive has been going strong for over a year now, and I highly doubt I would notice a difference between SATA2 and SATA3 in real world performance, but when I got this drive, the hoi polloi were yelling then too, "Don't get SATA2, wait for SATA3!" No thanks.

What many don't take into consideration is their personal usage scenarios. If one isn't doing anything that's crazy disk intensive, then they're likely not to notice the differences between many of these drives, seeing as most people turn on their PC and surf the web.

SSDs are just generally fast, and even the slowest ones are heads above HDDs.

Is it recommended to buy an extended warranty with this SSD? I see it comes with a three year limited manufacturers warranty.

Quote from hieuhef : What many don't take into consideration is their personal usage scenarios. If one isn't doing anything that's crazy disk intensive, then they're likely not to notice the differences between many of these drives, seeing as most people turn on their PC and surf the web. SSDs are just generally fast, and even the slowest ones are heads above HDDs.

I'm a power user by many standards, and I still wouldn't see a noticeable difference if using a SATA3 SSD. I understand your sentiment, though, in regards to the majority of computer users.

Beware this drive only lasts 47.5 years if you write 10 gigs/day to it. Stay away.

Quote from 5thElement : TLC memory. Stay away.

I wont go that far but I will say people NEED to read:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/506...g-tlc-nand
http://www.anandtech.com/show/645...f-tlc-nand

And decide for themselfs

It's funny that people have a fast CPU and think they need a new computer when their HD is the bottleneck. Having said that, I'm still too cheap to buy this but when they get a little cheaper I will. It wasn't long ago that $1 a gig was a good deal so they are definitely coming down in price. I put a small SSD in a buddy's old Dell (2002 old). Even though the computer wasn't able to take full advantage of all the features, it sped the computer up so much it was amazing. It's just a P4, but now it flies as a web surfer. The original HD was so slow it was pitiful. That's an extreme example, but for most people, this is the number one upgrade they could do to their computer.

Quote from clearanceman : It's funny that people have a fast CPU and think they need a new computer when their HD is the bottleneck. Having said that, I'm still too cheap to buy this but when they get a little cheaper I will. It wasn't long ago that $1 a gig was a good deal so they are definitely coming down in price. I put a small SSD in a buddy's old Dell (2002 old). Even though the computer wasn't able to take full advantage of all the features, it sped the computer up so much it was amazing. It's just a P4, but now it flies as a web surfer. The original HD was so slow it was pitiful. That's an extreme example, but for most people, this is the number one upgrade they could do to their computer.

That's why when people move from their ordinary laptop without an SSD to a computer with an SSD standard ( e.g. MacBook Air) they get surprised at the speed difference.

Quote from dubleo : That's why when people move from their ordinary laptop without an SSD to a computer with an SSD standard ( e.g. MacBook Air) they get surprised at the speed difference.

Exactly. And in the meantime, traditional hard drives have gained a lot of speed. Even putting a modern SATA HD in an older computer with a current IDE drive makes a huge difference. Most desktops had SATA ports for the last 10 years but came with IDE drives. Some with 2 to 8 megs of cache and now 64megs is cheap.

Went from a 120GB SSD to a Samsung 830 256GB yesterday. Maybe my experience will help you when you get your drive in.

I tried Clonezilla 3 times, but never successfully migrated the OEM image (it would migrate if the 3 partitions were kept exactly the same size, but it never could deal with proportionally expanding the partitions even though it says it has that feature). I had success finally when I went to Acronis True Image 11 home.
So, I then secure erased it, then did the migration again.

Samsung ships with Norton Ghost 15 (you can d/l it from their website now).
The manual was long so I figured I'd try Acronis first, and it worked w/o reading any manual

Samsung's Magician software, when used to do a secure erase, gave me a garbled graphics screen when I booted off of a CD of it, so I couldn't do a secure erase with it. I already have an Ubuntu Live USB stick, so I booted it and loosely followed the steps on this page:
http://peter.membrey.hk/2011/09/1...-your-ssd/
Loosely, in that he wrote how to secure erase using a Mac and I am using a ThinkPad laptop.
The neat step is closing the lid, letting the laptop sleep, then opening the lid again to get around the BIOS Freeze command that's sent to the drive to prevent you from using secure erase.

"The reason we do this is because when the Mac boots it sends the FREEZE command to the SSD. This prevents the SSD accepting any low-level commands and presumably is a safety feature. Unfortunately it also prevents you sending the ERASE command. However when the machine wakes up from sleep, the FREEZE command is not sent and so you can now erase the disk."

This close lid, sleep, open lid, worked fine on my ThinkPad too.