SSD Reliability these days...

[Caveman]

I've been out of the loop since SSDs were just making their way into the enthusiest build market... Question I have is how reliable are the drives these days?

I remember the word onthe street was Intel made the most reliable drives, and they were fast but maybe not the fastest.

I'm getting ready to build a 4770k Haswell rig and I wanted to use SSDs. Any recommendations for brand that scores highest in reliability and 2nd (or even 3rd) in speed is appreciated. Is it still Intel? Price is important, but I think I can adjust that point more with size since I don't need huge drives.

 

[Essence_of_War]

There are a ton of drives that are very reliable, and priced excellently.

Intel makes very good drives, but they're SandForce drives, so they have a few peculiarities associated with the SandForce controller.

The most recent drives made by:
Samsung (840/840 EVO)
Crucial (m500)
Seagate (600 series)
SanDisk (Ultra Plus)
are all excellent picks as well for a system/applications drive.

If you need a drive for high-performance scratch (video/photo editing, LR catalogs, etc) I'd check out:
Samsung (840 Pro)
SanDisk (Extreme II)
Corsair (Neutron GTX)
they're a bit pricier but they handle intense random write workloads well.

 

[Caveman]

Rig that will use the drive is being built primarily to support high powered flight simulation (not "games" like War Thunder)... Secondary use will be for HTPC, but I'm planning to use a 1TB BAracuda for storage there...

I'd assume then maybe a the Samsung EVO or Pro is a good pick. Lots of folks seem to like but wondering about reliabilty since I don't think the samsungs have been out very long.

On reliability, Which brands do I stay AWAY from? Seems like OCZ is pretty unreliable based on a few things I found this morning? Any other scary brands, makes/models?

And what exactly is a "random write workload"? I'd assume flight simulators are constantly writing back to files on thedrive to store the flights for recall later... Is this a random write?

 

[Charlie98]

The Samsungs are pretty well proven, not so much the EVO just yet, but the Pro. Having said that, my 840Pro died on me last month with not a year of service. Luck of the draw... I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one. After the 840Pro died, I grabbed a Plextor M5Pro as a replacement, it has been solid all the way, but the Plextor has a horrible toolbox, if that's of importance to you. I would add the Plextor M5Pro to the lineup above.

I just gathered parts for a general build for my inlaws, I wanted it as foolproof and reliable as I could get it... I picked an Intel 530, even considering the SandForce controller.

I also have a OCZ Agility3 that's going on 2 years old... never had a lick of problems with it, either. OCZ had some real QC issues in their 2nd and 3rd generation SSDs, I think mostly linked to the SandForce controller and their FW for it, but it generated a lot of hate for the OCZ brand.... not undeserved. I would not buy another OCZ drive for a number of reasons even though I have gotten very good service out of what is a lower performing drive (the Agility line) and the fact they are selling at giveaway prices.

A lot of people fret over the amount of writes to an SSD and effect on it's life, I don't worry about it... install it and use it. It's a consumable part. Monitor it with the toolbox (if provided) and CrystalDisk and be happy. I would also back up the OS drive just in case it dies... it happens (obviously.) I do daily full version backups of my OS SSD every day using Acronis... when my Samsung puked, I installed the Plextor, mounted my backup image and I was back in business. The build for my inlaws, even though it will have an Intel SSD... will also have Acronis and be backed up every week or so.

 

[Caveman]

Thanks.

What's so horrible about a Sandforce Controller? What dod it do or not do that it should?

 

[BrightCandle]

The Sandforce controllers seem to have an unfortunately high failure rate. I have had 3 out of 3 die on me and its pretty common to find that people have issues with them failing. I don't know why that is but it does unfortunately seem to be quite common (so much as we can tell from forum goers).

These days the competition have similar priced and performance parts that don't have a history of high failure rates and lots and lots of firmware updates so tend to get peoples recommendation these days.

 

[corkyg]

I have two Samsung 830 Pro SSDs in service for over a year. No sign of any problems. I use them without special care. I roo do not worry about the numbger of writes. I'm sure they will be replaced by newer, bigger, faster ones before that occurs. Along with that, I do not waste my time or SSD writes by running repetitive performance tests, especially CrystalMark.

 

[Charlie98]

I think part of the bad SF rap was with FW that was not fully developed, or FW that was designed to maximize performance in lieu of reliability, primarily OCZ. There has also been talk of substandard components and such, as well.

I wouldn't hesitate to get a modern SF controller especially in a known reliable brand such as Intel, who has full control over their FW.

 

[Hellhammer]

I think part of the bad SF rap was with FW that was not fully developed, or FW that was designed to maximize performance in lieu of reliability, primarily OCZ. There has also been talk of substandard components and such, as well.

I wouldn't hesitate to get a modern SF controller especially in a known reliable brand such as Intel, who has full control over their FW.

Intel doesn't have source code access to SandForce's firmware, so they don't have full control. However, most of the problems that SandForce drives had were right after the SF-2281 was released - current drives are much more reliable.

 

[Cerb]

And what exactly is a "random write workload"?

Typically database work, that either isn't fast enough on an HDD (IE, where an old SSD will beat any HDD array), or having plenty of torrents going. Something that can cause your SSD to need to maintain hundreds or thousands of writes per second over a long period of time.

I'd assume flight simulators are constantly writing back to files on thedrive to store the flights for recall later... Is this a random write?

Not likely. Chances are it will just send small writes to the OS, which will wait a bit, then lazily write it back out, resulting in nothing being different from an HDD to an SSD.

Definitely skip OCZ. The business itself is in the toilet, and they've had reliability issues for a long time. I'd have no problems getting an Intel SSD that used a SF-2281, save for the fact that Samsung, Micron, Toshiba, and Plextor are all typically cheaper, and I don't hold Intel in such a high regard as to spend more when those other drives are so competitively priced.

Plextor and Micron would be my choices if you wanted to have a good/quick warranty service option, at a good price. IME, Samsung and Toshiba can be annoying to deal with, and slow, though Samsung has gotten much better with RMAs in the last couple years. Even so, the chances of needing to RMA are pretty small, regardless. Today, SSDs from any brands positively mentioned in this thread should have an RMA rate, over their warranty, lower than most HDDs you might buy.

 

[Charlie98]

Intel doesn't have source code access to SandForce's firmware, so they don't have full control.

Not to derail the OP, but...

I thought that was one of the big plusses for Intel... they had full control over the FM? I must have misread that...

 

[Hellhammer]

Not to derail the OP, but...

I thought that was one of the big plusses for Intel... they had full control over the FM? I must have misread that...

Intel apparently mislead the press because even we thought that Intel had source code access but LSI/SandForce informed us later that even Intel didn't get full access to the source code.

 

[Puffnstuff]

The original sf controller was notorious for going into panic mode when the power fluctuated. Personally I wouldn't run any solid state drive without battery backup on my system to eliminate that worry.

 

[Torn Mind]

Rig that will use the drive is being built primarily to support high powered flight simulation (not "games" like War Thunder)... Secondary use will be for HTPC, but I'm planning to use a 1TB BAracuda for storage there...

Stay away from Crucial's V4 lineup.

Essence has it right. I'd add Toshiba SSDs to his suggestions.

Flight sims aren't much different from games. The CPU and GPU does their respective jobs in outputting a proper stream of images to the monitor, among other things. That the images have special requirements does not mean it is specially taxing on the CPU/GPU.

 

[John Connor]

Thanks.

What's so horrible about a Sandforce Controller? What dod it do or not do that it should?

I have two Sandforce based drives, one of which has 4.25TB of data written to it and it's still 100% healthy!

I too am a flight simmer. I would get the Samsung 840 Pro especially if you have third party terrain you need loaded quick.

 

[Elixer]

I am of the mindset that no matter which SSD (or HD) you get, you need to backup.
I have had a samsung 830 fail, a vertex 2 fail (twice), however, the 3rd one is doing just fine, and over 5TB of written data to it.
Also testing a toshiba Q series now...

 

[Essence_of_War]

What's so horrible about a Sandforce Controller? What dod it do or not do that it should?

Roughly, they perform differently for compressible vs. incompressible data, and if you fill them with incompressible data, they suffer perfomance losses, even after deleting/TRIM'ing. You can read a little more about it here:

First part of the article is all about the stuff I mentioned.

Essence has it right. I'd add Toshiba SSDs to his suggestions.

Good catch Torn Mind, the Toshiba Q-series in particular seems to be a good performer, and very well priced as well.

 

[Charlie98]

What's so horrible about a Sandforce Controller? What dod it do or not do that it should?

Does anyone know if there are still issues with sleeping a SF controller? One of the reasons I don't think I have problems with my Agility is because I never sleep it...

 

[John Connor]

The Sandforce SSD in my laptop goes to sleep and I can wake it with no problems...

It's a G.Skill Sniper BTW.

 

[bbhaag]

My Plextor has been really reliable over the years but I don't do anything intensive like encoding or gaming on it just general surfing. I leave the labor intensive stuff up to my platter drives. If you decide to incorporate an ssd into your new build I recommend you do the same.

 

[John Connor]

I game on mine they are good enough now a days to be regular use drives. Don't listen to that. If you do that just get a hybrid drive. I have the page file and temp file on the platter though.

 

[redhotiron2004]

I game on mine they are good enough now a days to be regular use drives. Don't listen to that. If you do that just get a hybrid drive. I have the page file and temp file on the platter though.

Why do you even need a page file at all?
Now a days everybody that do gaming have much more than 4gb of ram. I hope you must be having atleast that much. In which case you won't need any pagefile. Because that is not only slower than ram. But also decreases the life of the ssd or hardisk.

 

[John Connor]

But also decreases the life of the ssd or hardisk.

I already stated the page file was on the platter. And some files despite having over 4 GB of RAM will complain if there isn't a page file. I have 6 GB of RAM. Used to have 8 but one stick was bad. Way to go G.Skill! I'm a Crucial fan.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I play games with my 840 pro. I wish I had the funds to replace all of my spinners with ssd's.

 

[Cerb]

Why do you even need a page file at all?
Now a days everybody that do gaming have much more than 4gb of ram. I hope you must be having atleast that much. In which case you won't need any pagefile. Because that is not only slower than ram. But also decreases the life of the ssd or hardisk.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx
Read. Understand. Go from there.

4GB RAM does not make for not needing a page file. Not caring about dumps, and having confidence that your RAM alone is a sufficient peak commit, does.

Oh, and put the page file on the SSD. Everything wears out the SSD faster that writes to it. That it writes really fast is the point. Unless you're running Windows in 1GB RAM, you're not going to bring your SSD to an early death by having the PF on. It takes much worse than that to kill them early.