Better to just clone your drive using an external (or a desktop since you have a USB adapter). Or if you want to install fresh, you can use YUMI to put the install disc iso onto a usb flash drive.

Didn't work. I unloaded the ISO on the 830 SSD and booted from it, the W7 installation said it couldn't install on that unit because there was no support for installations to units connected via USB. So it looks like I will be forced to to put on the sata port and possibly have to burn a DVD(I have no flash disk with more than 2GB and W7 ISO has 3GB)
Any suggestion?

Put it in your laptop FFS

256GB Samsung 830 for $200 at newegg with promo code EMCYTZT1942
Offer is good for today only, so order it quick before they run out

Samsung 256GB 830 on sale for $182
http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/8006...sd-mz7pc256bww

That's an awesome deal. Thanks.

The 830 has hit that price probably 20 times in the last two months. Still a great drive but I'm not so hot on the price today. The Sandisk Extreme and (more recently) the HyperX 3K have been coming up $20-$30 cheaper. The Plextor M3 was $140 if you can stand rebates, which is still the best price I've seen on a 256GB.

The target price for the better 240/256 SSDs seems more like $150/$160 rather than $180 ish. NewEgg has the HyperX for $160 right now.

Then there's OCZ, which you all know I dislike, but they've been practically giving them away. Actually that have had them as free extras when you buy a motherboard at NewEgg. I still don't care for the brand, but there's still a price point for drives (like the Vertex 3) where even they might be worth the gamble.

Hey, I must have blinked and missed it, but Intel SSDs are not the best anymore?

Is the Samsung 830 the best? And how about if I want to go a little higher? 512 seems a bit too much and 256 might be tight. I want something around 300 Gbs.

Intel are considered the most reliable, but not the best performing. The Samsung are a great balance of high performance and great reliability

That's a tough capacity to find, for the most part they go 240GB, 256GB, 480GB and 512GB. If you're trying to watch costs you have a few options:

• Buy a 480GB Sandisk Extreme when it goes on sale for about $340.
• Buy a smaller one, like a 120GB, and pair that with an external or mechanical drive.
• Get a pair of 240GB for $300 and run them in RAID. It will improve drive performance a lot and also give you 480GB of storage, but the downside is if either drive fails, you'd lose everything (it writes data to each at the same time which is why it's faster).

In any case you'd want to backup your setup somewhere with a system image. Price-wise the cost per GB goes up once you get past the 240GB/256GB range.

Intels have a good rep for reliability but so do others at this point. Until their higher-end drives like the 520 come down in price there's really no justification for buying them. Especially the ones with SF controllers in them, you might as well get the Sandisk Extreme, Plextor M3, they're all basically the same. There's like 7-8 in the elite performance range right now, many with the same controller and Toggle NAND. My suggestion is to just get one at a good price (check for good reviews on NewEgg first). Here's a bunch of options:

Mushkin Chronos Deluxe
Patriot Wildfire
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G
Samsung 830
Corsair Force GS
SanDisk Extreme
Corsair Force GT
Kingston HyperX 3K
Intel SSD 520

Even beyond these there's not really all that much a dropoff to a Crucial M4 or Corsair Performance Pro either, but at the same price I'd rather have one from the above list if available in 480/512 like you need.

Thanks for the answers. I forgot to mention that since I multitable a lot and I sometimes lag after i get higher than 22-23 tables, I don't mind the cost even for the most marginal improvement on performance. I checked a bit what allows for good database performance and it's my understanding it's mostly random - not sequential- read primarily and random write secondarily.

Based on that I checked the reviews for Intel 520 and Samsung 830. Apparently, Anandtech's review from January indicated that Intel 520 was slightly better than the Samsung 830, especially as far as reading is concerned. Slightly. On some fronts like writing, it was behind. But then I came across an anandtech review that came out yesterday about the..... Samsung 840 which is supposed to come out in mid-October.

The Samsung 840 seems to be making all the discussion moot because even as it is a marginal improvement over the 830, it's unquestionably better than the Intel 520. Moreover, based on that review, I realized that the advantage the 520 had over the 830 based on the original review was a misunderstanding; anand was comparing the 520 250GB with the 830 512 GB. When models of the same size were compared those two disk were practically even with better write speeds giving the slight edge to the 830.

Which is what I knew from reading the answers in this thread!

Anywho, I am now thinking of waiting the 840 to come out in Mid-October. I suspect that its release is what's driving the 830 price drops, so worst comes to worst, the 830 is going to get even cheaper in the next couple of months.

PS. As far as size is concerned I ll probably stick with the 256 size. With me already having an X-25, even this purchase is on the border of frivolous overkill and anything above the 256 GB price levels seem above my comfort level.

I can't emphasize enough how close those drives are in real-world performance. I've used a number of SSDs going back to the first gen Intel 40GB. Once you get into the good 2011-era SATA3 drives and on you'd never know the difference without running benchmarks. These drives' performance is all jammed up because the SATA3 interface is just about at capacity.

I'd strongly recommend you just find a good, proven model at a decent price today. There's a lot that can go wrong with new firmware even when there are just minor tweaks to controllers, you don't want to deal with all of that. I mean Anand's hand-picked sample died during testing, and TechSpot sees need for a firmware update. Plus they're talking street price of $270 for the 256GB - that's insane. $100 less with get you an 830 on sale or even less for some other models I mentioned at that capacity. Nobody is paying street prices for these drives when they're constantly on sale.

If you want to gamble on a new model for a tiny increase, why don't you RAID two 240GB's? That would annihilate any single drive's performance by light years and give you 480GB of storage, AND save you money. There's two parts that can fail instead of one, but new stuff is pretty risky too.

The 830 256GB is on sale at 9am, $170 at NewEgg, no tax unless you're in NJ, CA, or TN. Hard to go wrong.

http://slickdeals.net/f/5247326-Star...-99-Ships-free

I didn't know about the techspot review, I found it. Yeah, it's a concern, but it doesn't look like the end of the world. But it's true, a new SSD without prior history represents a certain amount of risk. Overall, I don't think it hurts to wait for a couple of weeks and mull it over a bit.

Thanks again.