Overall and Final Verdict
So the Chronos is an interesting drive. For one, it is an old man sitting in a room full of young men. While the capacity is right up there with everything else on the market right now the older Sandforce controller is without a doubt aged. This really showed in some of our performance testing where it struggled to keep up. The biggest problem was with its write speeds. Oddly enough, the read speeds are in a few cases right up there with today’s drives and in one case even faster. The problem is the Chronos has to stand next to the Striker that I tested last week. As far as performance goes the Striker blows it out of the water. That isn’t a surprise though, the Striker is a flagship drive and the Chronos is a budge drive, so with that in mind it really comes down to pricing.
This is where the problem is. At this price point, on its own, the Chronos is a good buy. The problem is currently the Striker in the same 480GB capacity can be picked up for just a little more. To be specific currently the striker is $10 more. So the question is would you pick up the Chronos at what is a great price or pick up an even faster drive for less than a ticket to go see a movie. If I’m picking a drive for my personal build I’m going to get the Striker, the exception to this is if you just don’t care about the additional performance. In that case, you might go with the Chronos and pick up 7 apple pies at McDonalds with the extra money. Overall, this is a decent drive at a great price that is just a little overshadowed by a great drive that is also at a great price. If the price drops a little more this is going to be a steal though.
