Going to buy a 480GB SSD for a build in the near future. I've been looking at the Sandisk Ultra II and the Sandisk Plus but they cost about the same and it's just not clear which I should get. This would be used for storing the OS on as well as game installs and some essential programs.

I watched a video that told me I should look for 4K read/write speeds, and both seem to have their strong points and weak points in this comparison I found:

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/SanDisk-Ultra-II-480GB-vs-SanDisk-SSD-Plus-480GB/3473vsm131770

Any advice? Is one objectively better or are they designed for different uses? What would fit my use case the best?

EDIT: If you have a better alternative to buy for around the same price, that is of course welcome as well

Thanks

i am by no means an expert, but based on your comparison and this waaay too granular analysis it appears the ultra II performs better, but likely in ways you won't actively notice.

if it were me i'd opt for the ultra II unless you had substantial savings on the plus- i'm seeing the ultra II appear in a lot of recent builds so people must be having good results with it.

Write is how fast it'll install something, while read is how fast it'll access something that's already installed. For most people, read will be more important, as programs will load faster. In general, an SSD will be so much faster than an ordinary HDD that it any SSD will be an upgrade.

That being said, the SSD is restricted by the SATA format, to 6 GB/S for SATA-III. An m2 SSD, installed in a PCI slot will be even faster.

Edit: The m2 drive is also prohibitively expensive.

Well I am no SSD expert but I'll give you my opinion. First off, the Ultra II is clearly better with a much faster random read and mixed IO. The comparison is telling you that the Ultra II is 70% better in average user performance and 37% peak lab performance. Also, the Ultra II has a much higher market share, which means there are far more user results for the Ultra II over the Plus.

Also, it tells you that the Ultra II is ranked 319th of 808 vs 419th of 808. Neither is great frankly, but I rather be top 40% than below 50%.

Which leads me to my recommendation. Have you looked at the Samsung 850 Evo? Not sure how much these SSD's are in your area, the Samsung 850 Evo may be $30 more, but it just blows the SanDisk out of the water, and is frankly most people's default recommendation for a good general entry level SSD

850 Evo VS Ultra II

Anyway, just my two cents. Cheers.

QFT- the 850 evo is what i have, and it's been great. granted its my first and only SSD so i don' t have a basis for comparison, but here's some more buyer's advice if the OP is interested.

Unless you're doing some high level professional stuff that would benefit from insane SSD performance, in which case you'd be buying an m2 drive these days, it's at least third on the list of things you should consider when buying an SSD.

Reliability and price are the only things most people need to worry about.

i have a Samsung 840, which is instantaneous with pretty much any task after coming over from HDD. So imho go with best deal for the $ because you'll get amazing performance regardless

I can also recommend the Samsung 850 Evo.

If you are looking for an improvement from an HDD to an SSD, the difference in general will be night and day. To be honest, I'm not familiar with 4K read/write speeds. On a technical level somebody can probably make a better argument for benchmarking SSDs and why you should go with one over the other. Speaking generally, an SSD is going to be fast compared to HDDs; it is only a question of how fast.

There are bound to be faster solutions out there, like this Samsung drive has a little better performance, but costs about $80 more: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-850-Pro-512GB-vs-SanDisk-Ultra-II-480GB/3478vs3473. There are other drives that are faster performance wise, but then you are getting to drives that cost 50 to 100%, like some M2 drives and PCI-E SSDs. If you are looking around the $100-150 price range, you are probably going to get roughly the same performance. (Unless one drive is proven to be 15% faster and at that point you'll have to ask questions like "Will I even notice that?")

I'm a huge fan of the Samsung drives - partially because they built the best NAND that all the others use (except Micron, who makes NAND too but usually copies Samsung's tech a bit later). Samsung released their 3D V-NAND in the last couple years, which lowered the price and bumped up the reliability so much that they now have 5 or 10 year warranties, yet just a couple years ago you were lucky to get more than 1 year because most SSDs had really poor reliability. Plus the Samsung 850 series maxes out the SATA 3 bandwidth - so it's as fast as it gets, unless you move on to the new standard...

If you have the money for an add-in PCIe card, or slot on your mobo for an NVMe M.2 PCIe x4 SSD - use that instead, for the fastest speeds... those SSDs are 7x faster than any SATA3 SSD, but they do cost more. Not so much more that the speed isn't worth it, though, they're SUPER fast. You'd want the Samsung 960 series in that case. Both are linked below. I think the extra reliability and overall performance/reputation justify the extra cost of going Samsung, though the pricing seems to be at its highest in over a year for some reason. Maybe wait to find something on Black Friday or post-christmas sales...

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1479489717&sr=1-1&keywords=Samsung%2B850%2BEVO%2B500GB&th=1

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-950-PRO-Internal-MZ-V5P512BW/dp/B01639694M/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1479490019&sr=1-2&keywords=Samsung+960+EVO

By the way, SSDs are usually benchmarked in sequential reads/writes (which is the number they usually advertise, because it's the highest), and then also in 4K chunks of random reads/writes. The random reads & writes are usually a little closer to realistic, real world performance for most situations - except large file transfers.

Thanks to everyone who replied, I now have a much better idea of what to look for. I've never used an SSD before so no matter what I get it'll be a big improvement, and I can't really justify spending $100-$150 more on an M2 drive right now.

Going to ditch the Sandisk idea and probably get a Samsung instead based on the recommendations of so many of you, it only seems to be about $40 more where I live and I intend for this computer to last at least 4 years so making sure I get a really reliable SSD seems to be worth the extra cash. Gonna look around to see if I can get any deals in the coming weeks.

@hnke: I will also recommend the Samsung 850 Evo. I think I bought mine for like 40% off a few years ago on Black Friday, so I'd say keep an eye out for sales in the next couple weeks.

One more vote here for the Samsung Evo drives. I've used them for both personal computers and at work for staff laptops. Solid performance and reliability.

Yeah, I'd go with Samsung especially if you can't justify going M.2 or NVMe M.2 PCIe. Hand on my heart, computer storage is the most arcane and ever changing part of planning any build. People want fast storage and a lot of storage, and what is considered best changes.

[The part where I whine about my problems]
Thermal throttling an M.2 SSD is a real issue because those mother-trucking chips get very hot. Moreover, cooling the middle (or back) of your motherboard wasn't exactly 'design consideration' in most PC cases. Often, on a mATX motherboard your M.2 slot is precariously close to your first PCIe slot meaning your big fat, hot GPU card is warming that center portion of the PCB and you CPU cooler is blocking the other side - neither doing wonders for airflow.

I hear people are rigging up 'heat sinks' on their M.2-2280 cards. One person recommended easily available 'Enzotech BMR-C1-LE Memory Ramsink' adhered to each chip with thermal tape. In my next build I might take that advice, since I do want to get a M.2-2280 SSD.