whats the most reliable SSD right now?

[shortylickens]

OCZ is not taking care of me, though they did have a bunch of questions.
Amazon refused to take it back as well.

I now have a 190 dollar door stop. And it doesnt even work good as a door stop.

 

[SpacemanSpiffVT]

from my research, the crucial m4s are probably the most reliable right now

 

[Puffnstuff]

I think intel has the lowest defect rate right now. Their rma process seems to be pretty effective if you should have a problem. It took adata over 3 weeks to replace a bad drive for me recently.

 

[razel]

OCZ is not taking care of me, though they did have a bunch of questions.
Amazon refused to take it back as well.

I now have a 190 dollar door stop. And it doesnt even work good as a door stop.

If you bought it off Amazon and used a credit card, you may still have protection off of that. I used Amex's protection once on an LCD monitor that came with a Dell desktop system that I accidentally broke. After a few pictures and lots of forms they refunded my money back. It was retail cost of the LCD subtracted from the system price which was on sale too. I was more than happy. This was back in 04-ish.

 

[Coup27]

just out of interest, whats the latest with OCZ? I keep an eye on their forums mainly just for amusement but from what I have read, they have allowed customers to RMA their drives if theyre crashing.

 

[Puffnstuff]

The ocz drives are still susceptible to controller panic and I also monitor their forums as I have one for my boot drive. I wouldn't buy another sf ssd right now and wouldn't hessitate to buy intel.

 

[frostedflakes]

A lot of the problems with SF-1200 drives have been worked out with firmware updates haven't they? The SF-2200 drives seem to be going through the same growing pains that previous gen SandForce drives did, though.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I really would have expected failure rates to be really low, maybe it's still too immature but I recall way back when the drive makers were like "it's got no moving parts, nothing to wear out or break, it's indestructible. I guess I'm going to wait another year or two.

 

[frostedflakes]

My understanding is that very few SSDs die from hardware failure, most of the failures are due to firmware bugs that cause the controller to go into a panic mode, which in the case of SandForce controllers renders the drive inoperable until it can be recovered from this state (not possible for end-users, although I've read OCZ and other vendors have tools for this).

In theory the same thing could happen (and probably does occasionally) with hard drives. Seems to be more common in SSDs probably for a couple reasons. For one thing, SSD controllers and their firmware are far more complex than the controllers in HDDs (necessary to deal with the inherent flaws of NAND flash), so there's more that can go wrong. Also a lot of SSD makers are new to the storage business and don't have the decades of experience writing and validating firmware for drives that HDD manufacturers do.

 

[exdeath]

Right. 120 GB drive would have to see 1 GB of writes every day for 10+ years or so before the NAND write counts reached end of life of 10,000.

Personally it's worth the defect rate. Backup your data via disk image to a high speed external source, preferebly another high speed SSD. SATA III to SATA III or USB 3.0 to SATA III reimaging would take really what, all of 120 seconds?

Even if you have to RMA once a month, when it's so ridiculously fast that you can reimage in 2 minutes flat, you still end up shaving days off your life every month that you spend waiting on progress bars and hourglasses from shitty mechanical drives.

 

[86waterpumper]

I recently bought a owc 6gb mercury 120gb drive, and I called the service dept. before I ordered it. I asked them if their drives suffered the same issues as the ocz drives did with firmware and what not, and the tech acted completely baffled. He said they had not had any issues whatsoever with theirs. So it seems maybe this is not a issue with the 2281 drives in general? I don't know I never keep anything of real importance on a boot drive anyway and I agree it's better to deal with it than to go back to slow spindle drives! On a different note, is everybody still manually disabling superfetch and prefetch in windows 7 with the newest sandforce drives? I see that windows did not do this by default so i did it...
Just wondering if this was the right move?

 

[groberts101]

I asked them if their drives suffered the same issues as the ocz drives did with firmware and what not, and the tech acted completely baffled. He said they had not had any issues whatsoever with theirs. So it seems maybe this is not a issue with the 2281 drives in general?

easy to act/talk that way when you don't sell nearly as many Sandforce drives as OCZ or have an open forum/trail of tears to be discredited with.

There are also some specific platform issues(OROM's, drivers, etc) out there to skewe the picture as well.

The newest 2281 controller has issues with some systems regardless of the mfgr. Even the highly touted Wildfire drives are acting up a bit now so it's not as mfgr specific as some will have you believe.

On the plus side.. these new controllers don't panic lock nearly as much as the first gen SF's did/still do. Course.. BSOD's and cold boot issues more than make up for and wipe away those improvements/positives for some users.

IMHO... anyone expecting a Sandforce controller(1st gen or latest) to be a simple plug and play experience?.. are simply asking too much. Many(including myself) get lucky.. but not all or so fortunate.

 

[groberts101]

OCZ is not taking care of me, though they did have a bunch of questions.
Amazon refused to take it back as well.

I now have a 190 dollar door stop. And it doesnt even work good as a door stop.

Go to the OCZ forum and explain the issues with not being taken care of properly. There are some exceptions being made for those that ask. Just need to push the issue a bit and use the PM method to drive the point home. The squeeky wheel gets the grease. Good luck with it.

 

[KingFatty]

Could the issue with Sandforce controllers be related to how the controller pretty much zips/unzips data on-the-fly? That's why it performs so well with compressible data. I dunno, it just seems like you are asking for increased chance of trouble if you constantly zip/unzip the files when moving data. The marvell based drives (e.g., intel 510, crucial M4, etc.) avoid the compressing/decompressing on-the-fly, so seems that would be more robust than the sandforce approach? Is sandforce just artificially boosting the performance by this trick, at the risk of increased odds for trouble?

But is my assumption correct, is sanforce like a glorified hardware version of those old software programs that would compress your entire hard drive and use decompression/compression on-the-fly to increase storage capacity?

 

[Burner27]

Crucial C300 128GB gets my vote. I have 3 and they have been very reliable.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Very depressing reading this thread, as I'm planning on building a new system and thinking of finally getting a SSD.

Microcenter is selling the OCZ Agility 3 120gb for $160 but it doesn't sound like a good value now.

 

[KingFatty]

I think I'm going to hold out on my purchase until after the Samsung SATA III 6.0 drives that were recently announced are tested and get feedback on reliability.

Samsung will apparently have its own controller, so we'll see if they are as fast as the sandforce-based drives and/or as reliable as the marvell-based drives.

 

[capeconsultant]

I just ordered a second Intel 320 160GB drive. This will go in my MBP and run Lion and Windows 7.

I have the same in my desktop and love it. Would sure love that patch fix though. But I prefer they test if properly and take their time. OK, that is enough time, I want the fix NOW

 

[tp23]

From what I have read on the 8MB bug, as long as you power down correctly using the OS shut down system you should not run into this issue.

i put my x201s thinkpad to sleep (160GB Intel 320 SSD) and it never came back, 8MB bug. Had to do total erase from linux boot CD to restore SSD back to life - of course, total data loss. Luckily, all backed up. Still, over a day long interruption of work to reinstall system, apps and restore data from backup.

 

[MichaelD]

Months ago I put off buying a SSD because of the reliability issues they were having. Now I come back and revisit buying one and it's obvious that SSDs are still not ready for prime time. I'm sorry but if there's a good chance my drive will brick itself then I don't want to use it, period.

True, normal HDs die. Sometimes, but rarely do they "just die." At least in my experience (about 20 years' worth). Sure, I image my system automatically (Windows 7) once a week and store my critical data on a RAID5 NAS. But who wants to be reimaging their system constantly and/or dealing with warranty replacement?

It's disappointing b/c I really want the speeds only an SSD can deliver. But it seems to me that SSDs still aren't ready for Prime Time. :thumbsdown:

 

[Voo]

Wait what? What kind of HDD failures did you have in the past that weren't catastrophic?

And then from all the data we have HDDs have higher failure rates than SSDs so seems you were just lucky so far..

 

[groberts101]

same could have been said for the reliability and speed tolerances of bias ply tires not so long ago. I don't know why anyone would have waited to update to steel belted radials until they proved themselves.

When it comes to SSD's, I say use em' for what they're worth and enjoy the time savings they have to offer. Looking around at problem posts for perspective is extremely misleading and is only a drop in the bucket for the actual number of users(millions out there now) that do NOT have problems with SSD's. I've got 16 without issue as do many of my family members. Luck has not much to do with it if you research proven combo's and configs.

 

[grimpr]

Months ago I put off buying a SSD because of the reliability issues they were having. Now I come back and revisit buying one and it's obvious that SSDs are still not ready for prime time. I'm sorry but if there's a good chance my drive will brick itself then I don't want to use it, period.

True, normal HDs die. Sometimes, but rarely do they "just die." At least in my experience (about 20 years' worth). Sure, I image my system automatically (Windows 7) once a week and store my critical data on a RAID5 NAS. But who wants to be reimaging their system constantly and/or dealing with warranty replacement?

It's disappointing b/c I really want the speeds only an SSD can deliver. But it seems to me that SSDs still aren't ready for Prime Time. :thumbsdown:

You're missing the action, i suggest you dont peephole anymore and just open the door and join in.

 

[MichaelD]

Ah, I may do just that; jump in and hope for the best. I will probably go with an Intel 510-series drive. I really do want the speed. That's why I paid a lot of money for the Velociraptor in my gaming box (three years ago). I read stories about W7 getting to the desktop in a few seconds and it makes me drool.

 

[groberts101]

sounds like the SSD orgy is going to get bigger and bigger as time marches on. SSD's are worth every penny if they work right on the system.