Since I need to redo one of my desktops I think it makes sense to go to an SSD boot drive.

I'm thinking a 60 gig budget priced unit would do fine for a non gaming machine. Are there any brands/models to stay away from?

Heh. Yes.

Go do some reading on anandtech.com or techreport.com, and don't get just a 60. I mean, good lord, Newegg has a special this weekend on a 240 for something like $150. There is a significant performance increase to be had going with a larger size, because they use more flash chips, which means they can do more in parallel.

Avoid the cheapest stuff, obviously.

I'd go with Samsung (830 series only), Corsair, Crucial, or OCZ (and the last one is kind of a maybe).

http://techreport.com/news/23615/deal-of-the-week-ssds-at-55-cents-a-gigabyte?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techreport%2Fall+%28The+Tech+Report%29

Thanks Ken. It looks like OCZ is clearing inventory on older drives. The deal you linked to appears not to be available to those north of the 49th...

Hmm, if I put the price of the upgrade at a max of $90 are you saying it is not worth the performance upgrade vs an HDD?

Oh, it probably is, but you're eventually going to regret only having 60GB and you can get better bang for the buck with a larger drive (120, 240, etc).

Don't get an Intel; they're reliable but a little behind on tech.

I might go for this.

That is actually one I was looking at. One generation back is probably fine for my use. I can pick one up locally for $79 if they still have stock. That is comfortably in my budget.

I went with Intel because they're known to be the most reliable. At the time I purchased it, it wasn't dated; it had the new Sandforce (or whatever it's called) controller.

Fred, if you want to go with the drive Ken linked to, and you can't get it locally, Canada Computers has it on sale for $79.99. I searched around and that's the cheapest price I could find. I've ordered from them numerous times, and I've never been dissatisfied.

Thanks Cam. Went there today.

Ncix is another Canadian shop that has tons of deals each week.

I've been running an OCZ Vertex 2 for well over a year now. It has been the single biggest upgrade to computers in a long time. My boot time is less than 20s and booting down in about 6s.
Opening programs happens lickety split.
On that note, i had a friend with the same drive as mine. I built his computer. He's had 2 of them fail. He's now onto a Corsair if i recall.

Samsung 830 or Intel 520 are very good choices. Go for at least a 120 GB.

Actually, most of the current crop of SSDs should be fine. I was an early adopter and had huge headaches with my Vertex 3 when it was released.

For best practices, make sure to over-provision the SSD when it's the boot drive. Just don't allocate all the space for example when installing Windows, leave about 10% unallocated. This provides some very important extra space for the SSD firmware to do it's optimizations. Also, disable Windows drive spin down power savings. The SSD should always be powered, when the drive is idle is when TRIM, garbage collection and other maintenance activities occur. They can't happen if the drive is off. Along these lines, about once a week, reboot the computer and just leave it there over night. Don't log in or anything.

Chess, I've done some shopping there in the past. This time I got a better deal locally.

Boltron. I've not really played much with OS optimization and disk allocation. I'll have to look into it.

This advice is definitely not harmful, but it's also overly cautious. From what I understand, TRIM operations take place after only 15 seconds of idle time. Normal computer use — reading a web site, composing an email, writing a letter, etc. — does not always involve constant disk access, so there will be many opportunities for the SSD to process the TRIM commands without scheduling special down time for these to occur. More info is here: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_Idle_Time_Garbage_Collection_support

Sorry I should have elaborated a bit more. It's more than just TRIM.

Yes, I am a cautious guy and leaving the machine over-night might be overkill but overprovisioning is, I believe, good practice.

Overprovisioning reserves a portion of the drive to be used in garbage collection, wear leveling and other activities where information must be temporarily stored while a block is cleared. At the end of the day, OP helps increase the life of the drive. The extra space helps with wear leveling activities and provides additional space for remapping dead cells which is inevitable with SSDs. In addition, some argue that it may also help maintain long term performance.

The Samsung SSD Magician utility for my 830 actually has an over provisioning option built right in. This is the first para of the description: "Over-Provisioning is a feature that helps resize partitions on you SSD to create unused space on the drive, giving the controller room to manage, improve, and sustain the performance of you SSD. This feature is restricted by the amount of free space on your drive. Files are not reallocated during the resizing process."

SSD Review has an excellent article on the topic of SSD write performance degradation over time and OP:
http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/ssd-performance-loss-and-its-solution/

Additionally, leaving 10% unallocated is unnecessary--manufacturers actually make something around that amount unaccessible by the OS for just that purpose. It's why you see odd sizes for SSDs (240 instead of 256, 120 instead of 128, etc).

fred, I just went through enormous research on this and the Samsung 830 (current) as Ken suggested, stands out for speed, reliability and the controller it uses. I got a 256GB and the PC is being built as we speak. Do yourself a favor and bite the bullet to get a Samsung 830 128GB.

Set it up to be the boot disc, but only have the OS and programs on it. Put the data and even the cache on a different disc.

I already cheaped out and picked up one of the discounted OCZ drives. When I was in the store the guys there pointed out I'm using a SATA 2 connection and would not even fully benefit from the speed of the drive I bought.

For the price, it will be a good experiment. The MOBO/CPU on this machine is 4 years old already, so I expect I'll replace the whole system within 2 years anyway. When I do that I'll move the SSD to my next oldest system and buy a better drive for my new one.