Detailed solid-state drive specifications and reviews are great—that is, if you have the time to do the research. However, at the end of the day, what an enthusiast needs is the best SSD within a certain budget.

So, if you don’t have the time to read the benchmarks, or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right drive, then fear not. We at Tom’s Hardware have come to your aid with a simple list of the best SSD offered for the money.

November Updates:

Over the last month, a few SSD vendors released new drive models. Internally, however, they don't represent anything we haven't already seen from competing brands. For example, Patriot is leveraging a second-gen SandForce controller along with synchronous memory in its Pyro SE SSDs. That makes it quite similar to OCZ's Vertex 3 and Corsair's Force GT.

If you're on a limited budget, be aware that some low-end SSDs may perform worse than mechanical hard drives in random read and write operations (which is why we suggest reading reviews here and elsewhere). Traditionally, those are the disciplines where SSDs absolutely trash their mechanical predecessors. However, we've seen clear cases where that generalization turns out to be false. If you don't believe us, take a look at the performance of SanDisk's P4 SSD on page eight of Asus' Eee Slate EP121: A Windows 7-Based Tablet PC. So far, we've only seen this happen with cheap OEM SSDs, which is why we're going to recommend sticking to more established SSD vendors.

If you're absolutely cash-strapped, go the caching route with an Intel SSD 311 before rolling the dice on what could be a backwards-step in performance.

Endurance Intel SSD 320 300 GB Endurance Rating: 128 KB Sequential WriteQueue Depth of One 364 Terabytes Written Estimated Life: 128 KB Sequential WriteQueue Depth of 32 @ 10 GB per day 99 Years Endurance Rating: 4 KB Random WriteQueue Depth of 32 132 Terabytes Written Estimated Life: 4 KB Random WriteQueue Depth of 32 @ 10 GB per day 33 Years

If you're still on the fence about solid-state storage because of perceived worries over write endurance, you might want to check out page four of Intel SSD 710 Tested: MLC NAND Flash Hits The Enterprise. The figures for consumer SSDs like the Intel SSD 320 are very encouraging, given the right context. An average desktop only sees 10 GB of writes per day. Translated, that means you're looking at write endurance that extends well beyond the drive's warranty.

Some Notes About Our Recommendations

A few simple guidelines to keep in mind when reading this list: