Despite its plain looks and complicated product naming scheme, the Toshiba THNSNH512GCST left me very impressed. Its Marvell-based controller delivers leading performance, even without a DRAM cache chip. In our real-life testing, we see the drive cruise past the competition to end up with a 4% performance lead over the next-fastest drives, such as the Samsung 840 Pro and OCZ Vector. Only with our MySQL Enterprise database testing does its performance slouch; other drives, especially SandForce-based ones, do much better here. For typical consumer workloads, however, there is no faster drive available at this time.
In terms of pricing, Toshiba is asking $515, which is certainly not cheap, but SSD prices are rising as of late. I updated all the latest prices for our Performance-per-Dollar charts, and the Toshiba THNSH SSD seems to be a good alternative to drives from Samsung, Corsair, and OCZ. The only drive that offers a significantly better price/performance at similarly high performance levels is the Samsung 840 Pro.
The Toshiba THNSNH512GCST should definitely be on your shortlist if you are in the market for a 480-512 GB SSD.