SSD recommendations

[dumpystig]

Hopefully I will have the cash for a new SSD in the near future. I'm doing some research/googling but want to know what others here are using and their thoughts on their particular kit.
I haven't any shortlist as yet, but I do think that Intel may be a good way to go.

Remember, I'd prefer suggestions on kit you actually have or have used, not just 'I like...' or 'this sounds good...'.

The SSD is for the setup below. I intend to have the OS reinstalled on it with the rest of the setup as-is.

[shovenose]

Re: SSD recommendations

I'm interested in this thread too...

[gg1978]

Re: SSD recommendations

I have a Samsung 470 series 128G drive for the boot drive on my Main Win7 X64 box, it works great and newegg had a great deal on them at less than $200 for one.. The SSD that was in the box before that was an 80G Intel X-25 M, gen1. It never gave me any grief either, for that matter.. Either way, Win7 loves a SSD boot drive.

Damn, now newegg has the 470 for $170 now.. might have to get me another one!!!

[digge]

Re: SSD recommendations

I have an Intel X-25 M, gen 2, 160GB, its a pretty old drive now but very solid i must say. Never gave me any grief. There are of course newer and better drives around these days if you want performance, but i let others comment that actually own them as you requested

[TCKTMB]

Re: SSD recommendations

I have 3X OCZs from tiger direct and I love them all. The latest is a OCZ Solid3 120GB for my windows 7 box and it flys. I have 2 older vertex series SATA 2s, one in my laptop and one in my SX280. Watch newegg and tiger for black friday deals. The prices on these have come way down. I was going to get a REVO drive ( http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...323&CatId=5303 ) for my beast machine but the solid3 was almost as fast R/W, Read up to 500MB/s and write up to 450MB/s.

[dumpystig]

Re: SSD recommendations

Thanks for the replies. TBH I expected a bigger response to this thread - maybe not many are using a SSD (or simply can'tb be arsed).

Anyway, I'm still looking at different brands and Intel is still looking like a good choice. But your experiences are welcome.

[smason]

Re: SSD recommendations

My WIn7 desktop has a Corsair Force series, and my Notebook has an Intel X-15 M.

What a difference it makes to the notebook, this 4 year old Dell Latitude rocks with an SSD and 4GB RAM.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: SSD recommendations

Get either intel or samsung, both are pretty reliable unlike OCZ and other brands.

I've got a intel 320 series in a booksize intel atom computer. Sped the damn thing up ten fold. I've had it since may, no problems yet.

[mariushm]

Re: SSD recommendations

Some of the cheaper drives based on Indilinx "chipsets" have stuttering issues - they freeze for a few milliseconds every few minutes.

The "Sandforce" based ssd drives are usually the fastest but they drives themselves are buggy - they keep fixing bugs in the firmware but new ones pop up every once in a while. If you're unlucky to have a motherboard that doesn't like Sandforce chipsets, you get sudden blue screens or you simply lose the partitions at the next reboot and so on.

The drives that are proven to be reliable so far and with no issues are the ones using Marvell controller (Corsair M4 I believe), Samsung and Intel drives with one exception - the new 40 or 80 GB drive from Intel had one bug where the partition size would reset to 8 MB but they fixed it a while ago with a firmware update.

One of the Intel's drives is actually using Marvell's controller instead of theirs to save costs, so if Intel trusts Marvell enough, it must be ok.
Apple uses Toshiba and Samsung in their equipment so I guess they're Ok as well.

So while the Marvell, Samsung or Intel drives are not the fastest, they're just as good as low latency, random access as the faster ones and basically, it really doesn't matter than Intel's drive can only read with 200 MB/s while Sandforce drives can read with 280 MB/s - it's just a stupid metric to focus on. You're buying them for low access times.

[Longbow]

Re: SSD recommendations

As cool as they sound, development of SSD's is in its beginning stages. Have a look through the Newegg customer comments on various drives to get some idea of what can happen. SSD's don't give you any warning. They just stop working and can't be fixed. At least with traditional hard disks, you usually get some clues that the drive is failing before it just stops dead.

[dumpystig]

Re: SSD recommendations

Yeah, looking at customer comments seems a good idea, thanks.

@ mariushm that's good advice you give, I will keep it in mind while I'm looking/deciding.

[pfrcom]

Re: SSD recommendations

At least with traditional hard disks, you usually get some clues that the drive is failing before it just stops dead.

Not necessarily - https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=16961

[dumpystig]

Re: SSD recommendations

I think the key word was 'usually'... which I would agree with.

[TCKTMB]

Re: SSD recommendations

OCZs have a 3 year warranty and MTBF of 2,000,000 hrs. With no moving parts there isn't much to fail. SSDs are not new, they are just new to the consumer market. ( http://www.storagesearch.com/chartingtheriseofssds.html )

. All 3 machines I use daily are running 100% on SSDs and I have yet to have a problem.

[mariushm]

Re: SSD recommendations

The MTBF value is irrelevant to regular users. A drive can have 10 million hours and still fail within the first week - it's "mean time between failures" for a reason...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures and http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/t...tml/index.html for more information.

later edit: a rough/very simple/not so accurate but good enough explanation of the mtbf is.... let's say the drive says it has a MTBF of 2.000.000 hours - it means that if you go now and buy 200.000 drives and run them all at the same time, at least one drive will fail every 10 hours. So about 2 and a half drives will fain within a day if you have 200k drives. That's about 0.001% drives fail within a day or 0.04% drives out of 200k dead in the first month (80 out of 20k will die in the first month).

In reality, even Intel's ssd drives fail at about 1-2% within a year or so of operation:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-6.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-8.html


SSD drives are more dangerous than regular drives because of the way they're made... lots of things can fail. In the ideal world, the only failure should be when a particular memory "block" (a set of memory "pages", each page being generally 4 KB of data but varies from controller to controller and memory chips to memory chips manufacturer) in the flash chip reaches the maximum number of erase-write cycles... and then by design that memory block becomes "read only". However, in reality it turns out that the most often failures are not in the memory chips but rather in the electric circuit on the board, in the controller themselves, in bad drivers, in failures to properly write down to the flash memory whatever data the controller has in its ram buffer when user shuts down and so on.

There are lots of compromises made in lots of places in order to get the price down to consumer level and to get higher speeds. I could go on with lots of details about how the SSD drives are not that great but I doubt you guys care that much.

If you really want to learn how they work and what can fail I highly recommend reading these three articles from Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829

They're quite long but have a TON of information about how they work and though the first pages show Intel drives, I really didn't find them biased towards Intel drives in any way.... and the technical stuff applies to all SSD technology.

[dumpystig]

Re: SSD recommendations

Aw fuck, now you've gone and spoiled what I initially thought was going to be a relatively easy purchase - by page 9 of the first Anandtech article my head is mashed and I want to go to bed now... I will have to resume my homework tomorrow.
Thanks for the info though. (I think!)

EDIT - AW fuck, you've added more in your edit...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: SSD recommendations

stuttering issues - they freeze for a few milliseconds every few minutes.

Sounds just like a flaky HDD. The Maxtor "6E" (a.k.a. DiamondMax 8) and Seagate U-series HDDs have a bad habit of this.

The Maxtor "6E" does it when about to die

[mariushm]

Re: SSD recommendations

yeah.. the problem is we're talking about ssd drives.

the stuttering is due to cheapo controllers that don't have enough sram cache inside them to write the data to memory cells fast enough in some circumstances.

[TCKTMB]

Re: SSD recommendations

The MTBF value is irrelevant to regular users. A drive can have 10 million hours and still fail within the first week - it's "mean time between failures" for a reason...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures and http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/t...tml/index.html for more information.

later edit: a rough/very simple/not so accurate but good enough explanation of the mtbf is.... let's say the drive says it has a MTBF of 2.000.000 hours - it means that if you go now and buy 200.000 drives and run them all at the same time, at least one drive will fail every 10 hours. So about 2 and a half drives will fain within a day if you have 200k drives. That's about 0.001% drives fail within a day or 0.04% drives out of 200k dead in the first month (80 out of 20k will die in the first month).

In reality, even Intel's ssd drives fail at about 1-2% within a year or so of operation:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-6.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...te,2923-8.html


SSD drives are more dangerous than regular drives because of the way they're made... lots of things can fail. In the ideal world, the only failure should be when a particular memory "block" (a set of memory "pages", each page being generally 4 KB of data but varies from controller to controller and memory chips to memory chips manufacturer) in the flash chip reaches the maximum number of erase-write cycles... and then by design that memory block becomes "read only". However, in reality it turns out that the most often failures are not in the memory chips but rather in the electric circuit on the board, in the controller themselves, in bad drivers, in failures to properly write down to the flash memory whatever data the controller has in its ram buffer when user shuts down and so on.

There are lots of compromises made in lots of places in order to get the price down to consumer level and to get higher speeds. I could go on with lots of details about how the SSD drives are not that great but I doubt you guys care that much.

If you really want to learn how they work and what can fail I highly recommend reading these three articles from Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829

They're quite long but have a TON of information about how they work and though the first pages show Intel drives, I really didn't find them biased towards Intel drives in any way.... and the technical stuff applies to all SSD technology.

Those anandtech articles are from 2008-2009, SSDs have come a long way since 2008. I'm not sold that they are more reliable than a good HD but the jump in performance is worth the risk that it is as reliable as a HDD. Only fools don't back up their important data regardless of storage media.

Quote from the Teds article ". Should you be deterred from adopting a solid-state solution? So long as you protect your data through regular backups, which is imperative regardless of your preferred storage technology, then we don't see any reason to shy away from SSDs. To the contrary, we're running them in all of our test beds and most of our personal workstations. Rather, our purpose here is to call into question the idea that SSDs are definitely more reliable than hard drives, based on today's limited backup for such a claim."

[dumpystig]

Re: SSD recommendations

Got meself one of these: Kingston SNM225-S2B/160GB (Intel X25-M SATA.)

http://www.kingston.com/ssd/m-series.asp


I know it's not the latest of devices but it's still a good piece of kit. Plus it's brand new/sealed with fitting kit/cables etc. and I got it for a great price too.
Thoughts, anyone?