SSD discussion..are they all the same?

The data transfer speeds are usually the difference. Similar to a 5400 or 7200rpm on a spindle drive. SSDs are measured in MB/s

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just going to take ILIKE's advice to move my son's OS to a SSD

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His advice to me was something like "They're probably close to all the same in practice, but I'm pretty gay for Samsung's NAND Controller's"

I bought an 840 Evo (Samsung) because of it.

I've used Samsung, Kingston, Crucial, and SanDisk. Never could really tell the difference, but then again all were installed on different machine, so YMMV.

120GB should be fine/plenty. Teach him only to install applications there. Media + documents should go elsewhere. My main desktop actually uses a 32gb ssd, OCZ Vertex, with several HDDs and key apps only on the ssd. It's pretty effective.

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$65

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$80

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Didn't you get on me for not spending 30 more on a router and now you won't do it for 15?

Basically all the same. Most of the drives use the sandforce controller just with different firmware.

120gb is good for install and apps, but 256gb is so cheap these days

If he's still using it for gaming, keep in mind that there are games out there that do benefit from the reduced load times -- namely the ones with huge maps and tons entry/exit points that have load screens. Skyrim is a good example. He might want to have some games on the SSD, and nowadays it's not uncommon for a single game to be upwards of 40-50GB.

That being said, might be worth spending $100-110 on a 250GB drive, since you do get a little more GB for your dollar there.

As for whether they are all the same, yes and no. Yes, any new one you buy today is going to be fast and you likely won't notice any performance difference between one and another unless you run benchmarks. No, because the controllers and NAND types vary, affecting performance in various ways.

SSDs are usually advertised with the following specifications:

Max Sequential Read/Write Speed: These numbers are most prominently marketed because they’re the highest. They represent the max megabytes per second (MB/s) that can be achieved transferring or copying a single large file. You’ll often see today’s SSDs with advertised sequential read speeds between 400MB/s and 600MB/s, while sequential write speeds can range from less than 200MB/s to over 500MB/s.

4KB Random Read/Write Speed: These numbers are more important for daily real-world use. In the daily use of your programs and games, you’ll be reading and writing smaller files of various sizes in random locations (documents, game saves, browser cache/cookies, etc.). The specs for 4KB random read/write performance are given in IOPS (input/output operations per second). To convert this to MB/s, you can use this formula:

(IOPS * KB per IO)/1024

For example, if an SSD has an advertised 4KB random read speed of up to 100,000 IOPS, then:

(100,000 * 4)/1024 = 390.63 MB/s

The biggest difference you'll find among SATA SSDs are write speeds, both sequential and random, while read speeds (particularly sequential) are all close to full saturation of SATA III bandwidth.

If you get down to the nitty gritty, the NAND types can vary -- MLC vs TLC, the latter being a newer, less expensive type. It is able to store more data per cell, and as a result it has a lower write cycle threshold -- this is not anything to worry about. With wear leveling on controllers, it's still going to last you 15-20 years. If you keep drives that long in anything but an enterprise environment, that's weird.

Another difference is how companies advertise their speeds vs how controllers handle data. One particular feature of Sandforce controllers -- which are found in pretty much every drive that isn't Intel, Crucial, or Samsung -- is their write performance with highly compressible data. The speeds advertised are those tested with synthetic benchmarks that use compressible data and allow the sandforce controller to hit its full potential. In real-world use, this isn't necessarily going to be the case. While all modern SSD controllers are better at writing compressible data, Sandforce particularly relies on it heavily. This is mainly why you see sandforce-based drives with inflated performance numbers generally go toe to toe with the more modest specs advertised by Crucial and the like when doing real-world performance tests.

There's another difference in NAND type -- asynchronous vs synchronous. SSDs rely on voltage and gates as signals to write to memory, and synchronous NAND writes to memory similarly to DDR RAM, by moving data at the top and bottom of a signal wave, so one end indicating that data is ready on the other end, and back and forth. Asynchronous uses a single signal pulse at a time. What this translates to is more than double theoretical performance on synchronous (although the real world differences are not that huge because of the controller's limitations and the fact that in the real world NAND is not going to be signaled at perfect regular intervals since the user's input will be irregular). Asynchronous is cheaper, and the specs are often advertised to be similar to synchronous, but real-world performance shows that some of that performance is lost to overhead because of how asynchronous works.

Right now, bang for buck-wise, I'd recommend the 256GB Crucial MX100 -- Marvell controller, MLC synchronous NAND, 550 and 300 MB/s for seq. read and write respectively, and 85,000 IOPS 4K random read and 70,000 IOPS random write.
$112.99 Amazon prime: LINK
$109.99 free shipping at NCIXUS.com: LINK

If you still want to keep it cheap and go with 120-ish GB, the Crucial M500 or MX100 are still a solid recommendation. The difference, other than capacity, will be a considerable reduction in write speeds which is inherent in any lower capacity SSD. Crucial and Samsung's number are always more in line with real world performance than the numbers advertised in Sandforce-based drives. But as I said up front, you could take 10 of the cheapest 120 or 250gb SSDs, draw a model number out of a hat, and you'd be happy with its performance.

Too late, your mind has already been raped by it.

Same. I like that approach for diagnosing problems as well. The solution is far less interesting to me than the reason behind it, even if the explanation is a little bit over my head.

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might be worth spending $100-110 on a 250GB drive

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Couldn't agree more. My first SSD was a 128 but it wasn't long before I was uninstalling stuff just to free up space.