As we head to the end of 2009 - the truly decent 2.5" SATA SSD's worth buying and give the best bang for the buck can be simplified down to a handful. The broad adoption of Indilinx and Samsung controller chips - combined with ample on-board cache has taken performance to new levels - and leveled out the playing field.

The best value lies in these few drives: An OCZ Agility, A Super Talent UltraDrive ME, The Patriot Torqx or Warp V3 Series, and an OCZ Vertex & Summit -- or perhaps a RAID 0 Apex. The rest of the chart below - from BenchMarkReviews.com - was cropped out - It just wasn't worth bothering with - altho Corsair's latest Samsung/Indilinx models probably should have had a spot on the list, as the still highly respectable Intel SSD G1 and G2 drives.

In the OCZ Vertex drive variants and Firmware Revs shown below - the performance differences may matter only to the incremental Tweaky-Geeks who live by a stop-watch or have bleeding-edge wallets. The designs, controller chips, clock-speed of the flash memory chips used - are all leveling out to a basic commodity used in most of the drives these days. Any of the handful of SSD's above will deliver GREAT performance far, far exceeding your original SATA hard drive.

Tags: indilinx ssd, samsung SSD, fastest ssd