Computers relying solely on historic period onetime hard disk drive technology should be deemed a thing of the by. Mechanical devices suffer from wearisome response times, so if and when performance matters, spending a small-scale amount of coin on upgrading a PC's kicking drive could pay off enough to render other potential upgrades useless.

TechSpot's first SSD review was published in early 2009, a roundup no less. Back so we tested Intel'southward first generation consumer-level solid state drive, the X25-M. The get-go-gen OCZ Vertex also fabricated the cutting, along with drives from G.Skill and Super Talent. These last three were companies that had a background on selling computer retention (RAM) but that sought the opportunity of inbound the performance flash-based storage market place.

Merely of course, the major effect with SSD adoption over the past few years has been price, the astronomically high price when you lot are counting in hundreds of gigabytes.

Some 2 years ago we published a budget sub-$150 SSD roundup that included half a dozen pop SSDs of the fourth dimension. Although they all cost less than $150, they likewise had in common a very limited storage capacity.

The OCZ Vertex ii 40GB came at $iii.x per gigabyte and was still one of the best drives featured in our review. The Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB was one of the better value drives at $125 ($one.95 per gigabyte) and was also amidst the highest capacity SSDs tested.

At best, these sub-$150 SSDs could exist used as a boot bulldoze, but across that getting all your favorite applications and games installed on a budget SSD was going to be a stretch. Thankfully a lot of progress has been made since then and while drives have go considerably faster they have also become significantly cheaper.

In today's comparing review we are going to look at 8 pop SSDs that price $100 or less and characteristic capacities of up to 128GB. The table below will give you a snapshot of the drives, models, capacities and central differentiating features:

Model Capacity Toll Price/GB Controller Memory
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB $115 90c OCZ Indilinx Everest 2 25nm Synchronous
Samsung 840 120GB $110 92c Samsung MDX 19nm Toggle
Crucial m4 128GB $105 82c Marvell 88SS9174 25nm Synchronous
Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 90GB $100 $1.11 SandForce SF-2281 25nm Synchronous
Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB $xc 75c SandForce SF-2281 25nm Asynchronous
OCZ Vertex 4 64GB $75 $ane.17 OCZ Indilinx Everest 2 25nm Synchronous
Crucial m4 64GB $73 $i.fourteen Marvell 88SS9174 25nm Synchronous
Samsung 830 64GB $70 $i.09 Samsung MCX 27nm Toggle

The SSDs have been arranged by price and you lot will discover that the top 3, which includes the OCZ Vertex iv 128GB, Samsung 840 120GB and Crucial m4 128GB are currently listed just higher up the $100 mark. Withal, we decided to include them as numerous online deals have enabled buyers to purchase these SSDs at under $100 over the past few weeks.

Moreover, these tend to offering exceptional value fifty-fifty at their list prices and are likely to drop in cost permanently sooner rather than later.

The most affordable high-chapters SSD featured in our roundup is the Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB, while the OCZ Vertex iv 64GB, Crucial m4 64GB and Samsung 830 64GB should all offer stellar performance for under $80.