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Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Poppycoke posted:

So I was trying to install my recently bought SSD into my Macbook and encountered a problem. The connector on my Macbook is too small to fit into the input bit on the SSD. A bit of googling tells me that i need a female SATA (for the SSD) to male PATA (for the connector to the Macbook, not 100% on this though.

I've seen this which would seem to solve my problem but I'd rather not spend that much when it seems all i need is a small cable.

http://hardwrk.com/en/ssd-hdd-adapter-kit-for-macbook-pro-pata.html

Can anyone help?

Are you installing the SSD in the optical bay or HDD bay?

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Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Josh Lyman posted:

Does anyone have any experience with Kingston? Newegg has Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB for $90 after $30 rebate. Price is good, of course, and AnandTech seems to have good things to say: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5734/kingston-hyperx-3k-240gb-ssd-review

Kingston makes fine drives. However, be aware that the '3K' in the product name stands for the memory cells being worth 3,000 writes. The cells in the regular non-3K drive is good for 5k writes.

You're still good for 8.2 years of life writing 10GB/day but that's only a 60% of the theoretical life of the 5K chips.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

DrDork posted:

They don't count if they're all RMAs off the same original drive :colbert:

Five different ones actually, I have not RMAd any of them.

TwoKnives
Dec 25, 2004

Horrible, horrible shoes!

Former Human posted:

The Intel 330 180GB is $140 after rebate on newegg. That's $110 off the regular price and $10 less than the 120GB version.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167122

Wow, this is an amazing deal. It's a shame they don't do international shipping or I'd buy one in an instant.

The 330 has been added to the Anandtech SSD bench recently if anyone wants to see how it measures up.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/589?vs=425

Poppycoke
Dec 22, 2006

Miaow

Bob Morales posted:

Are you installing the SSD in the optical bay or HDD bay?

I'm installing the SSD in the HDD bay where it fits perfectly. My problem is then fitting the HDD into the optical bay.

cage-free egghead
Mar 8, 2004

fletcher posted:

:lol: why do people keep supporting this company?

Because I am willing to take a small risk. I'm not an idiot with backing up my important poo poo. I am usually always prepared if my OS drives take a poo poo.

The Vertex 4's use the same controllers as the M4's use, just custimized firmware. Has the stability of this new gen really matched the ones from 2 years ago? I understand that they tarnished their reputation pretty badly but to dismiss them entirely because they had a bad run with SandForce controllers seems a bit much. I don't mean to defend OCZ because I don't know enough on these controllers but to my understanding other companies are using the same exact ones.

In my case I had some money to spend for an SSD and found a good deal on this one so I jumped on it and got a replacement plan with it. If it shits the bed anytime I'll just return it for a different, brand new ssd.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

Lblitzer posted:

I understand that they tarnished their reputation pretty badly but to dismiss them entirely because they had a bad run with SandForce controllers seems a bit much.
It wasn't just Sandforce. They've done bullshit with using lower quality NAND and not telling folks, then when they got called out they didn't want to do anything about it. It was enough of a PR disaster that they finally caved and allowed folks to pay to send their drive in and get the one they thought they were buying the first time around.

Tunga
May 7, 2004

Grimey Drawer

Poppycoke posted:

I've seen this which would seem to solve my problem but I'd rather not spend that much when it seems all i need is a small cable.

http://hardwrk.com/en/ssd-hdd-adapter-kit-for-macbook-pro-pata.html

Can anyone help?
My understanding is that SATA and PATA are not elctrically compatible, so you can't just get a one dollar adapter as you can for the power cables. Having said that, that price is crazy, probably because it includes a DVD enclosure and data transfer cables or something. Startech make this thing which I'd bet you can find on Amazon US or Newegg:

http://www.ebuyer.com/161418-startech-ide-to-sata-drive-motherboard-adapter-pata2sata2?utm_source=google&utm_medium=products

Note that you'll need a power separate adapter, but those are cheap and easy to find.

I also have no idea if that thing would fit in your laptop, I've done hardly any work on laptops and none at all on Apple stuff.

Tunga fucked around with this message at 18:41 on May 24, 2012

cage-free egghead
Mar 8, 2004

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

It wasn't just Sandforce. They've done bullshit with using lower quality NAND and not telling folks, then when they got called out they didn't want to do anything about it. It was enough of a PR disaster that they finally caved and allowed folks to pay to send their drive in and get the one they thought they were buying the first time around.

So then what's the scoop now? They seem to be playing a more fair game by admitting about the whole Idinilix thing. Are there still reliability issues with their latest generations or is that still up in the air at this point?

I mean really some people haven't had a single problem, myself included with my old Vertex 2. Made it a year and 3 Windows installs just fine. I'm still a little uneasy owning a Vertex 4 with their reputation but I'm just going to hold out until I find a single problem to exchange it for an M4 or Samsung drive.

Basically I should have just waited to find another good deal like last week's M4 but me being frugal some days and impulsive another lead me to this silly state.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
The bottom line is that there are companies out there who haven't been institutional douchebags and, more importantly, have made better products (even using the same parts). If you've had no trouble with OCZ stuff, congrats, because you got lucky. You got lucky on the huge risk you took in part failures, being dicked over buying falsely advertised products, and having to deal with their awful customer service.

Bokito
Jul 25, 2007
Going Ape
Amazon Germany has the 256 GB Samsung 830 Desktop Upgrade Kit on sale for 179,90 Euro (0,7 Euro/GB!):

http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-MZ-7PC256D-EU-interne-6-0Gbps/dp/B005OK6VJ0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337883553&sr=8-2

They also ship to other European countries.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
They lost trust in the community, basically, so even if they poo poo out a good product now and then, I'd rather choose an alternative.

That said, my laptop I'm using now has a Vertex 2 which I received after an RMA, and to their credit they did ship me a brand new one with not a huge amount of fuss (but my troubleshooting steps were extreme).

The Gunslinger
Jul 24, 2004

Do not forget the face of your father.
Fun Shoe

Lblitzer posted:

So then what's the scoop now? They seem to be playing a more fair game by admitting about the whole Idinilix thing. Are there still reliability issues with their latest generations or is that still up in the air at this point?

I mean really some people haven't had a single problem, myself included with my old Vertex 2. Made it a year and 3 Windows installs just fine. I'm still a little uneasy owning a Vertex 4 with their reputation but I'm just going to hold out until I find a single problem to exchange it for an M4 or Samsung drive.

Basically I should have just waited to find another good deal like last week's M4 but me being frugal some days and impulsive another lead me to this silly state.

It's not just product quality or design issues. It's how they handled everything and this has been a problem of theirs for a long time now (voltage issues with their ram, their lovely PSUs dying early deaths, the NAND scandal, etc). So yeah people dismiss them outright now because there are simply equivalent or better products to buy without those problems from more reputable companies.

Obviously spend your money however you want but there's a reason people get some scorn heaped on them when they mention buying OCZ products in a thread with a title like this one :)

spanko
Apr 7, 2004
winnar
Is anyone else having problems with their Crucial M4 lately? In the last two days I've had two different people tell me their M4s starting crashing and the details are exactly the same. The computer locks up but sound still works including push to talk voip like mumble, ventrilo, or skype. They can move their cursors around for a few seconds but can't interact with anything, and then the computer BSODs. There's some posts on the Crucial SSD forums about it but no response from Crucial, and its hard to tell if the issues on the forums are the same thing. Its just really weird cause both these people have had their drives for a while, updated their firmware in the last couple months, and both their problems started in the last two days.

Dogen
May 5, 2002

Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

spanko posted:

Is anyone else having problems with their Crucial M4 lately? In the last two days I've had two different people tell me their M4s starting crashing and the details are exactly the same. The computer locks up but sound still works including push to talk voip like mumble, ventrilo, or skype. They can move their cursors around for a few seconds but can't interact with anything, and then the computer BSODs. There's some posts on the Crucial SSD forums about it but no response from Crucial, and its hard to tell if the issues on the forums are the same thing. Its just really weird cause both these people have had their drives for a while, updated their firmware in the last couple months, and both their problems started in the last two days.

So presumably it's not the 5000 hour bug, then?

Wild EEPROM
Jul 29, 2011


oh, my, god. Becky, look at her bitrate.
Don't forget about OCZ's actual capacity (115 vs 120gb) thing going on, or the switch to 25nm without advertising it as such, or that they didn't even admit to the marvell controller until someone took one of their drives apart and called them on it.

Shady, shady company.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

jwoven posted:

Shady, shady company.
They were shady and had a terrible reputation for PC components even before they got into SSDs.

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009


Star War Sex Parrot posted:

They were shady and had a terrible reputation for PC components even before they got into SSDs.
See, that's what confuses me. Back in my HardOCP days circa 2000, OCZ was considered utter crap. They were like a product review website that started selling overclockable RAM and heatsinks. I was surprised to learn in the mid 2000's that they had expanded to legitimate products like PSU's and USB flash drive, and then with the Vertex's, they became the performance leader in SSD's. And now that they bought PC Power & Cooling, which back in 2000 was an ultra premium brand above Antec or Thermaltake, I don't know what to think. :psyduck:

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

They were shady and had a terrible reputation for PC components even before they got into SSDs.

I dunno, I thought their RAM was fairly well regarded. I ran all OCZ DDR2 on my older systems, but then again it wasn't any crazy extreme overclocker stuff, like some of the really high-end Crucial Ballistix.

e: ^^ 'sup fellow former [H]tard

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

movax posted:

I dunno, I thought their RAM was fairly well regarded. I ran all OCZ DDR2 on my older systems, but then again it wasn't any crazy extreme overclocker stuff, like some of the really high-end Crucial Ballistix.

e: ^^ 'sup fellow former [H]tard
By the time DDR2 rolled around they had mostly cleaned up their act. Their horrible RAM days were in the DDR/SD-RAM days around 2000. Behold, people basically saying the same thing about OCZ (that they used to be terrible) back in 2003. :laugh:





gently caress that company.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell

Factory Factory posted:

The bottom line is that there are companies out there who haven't been institutional douchebags and, more importantly, have made better products (even using the same parts). If you've had no trouble with OCZ stuff, congrats, because you got lucky. You got lucky on the huge risk you took in part failures, being dicked over buying falsely advertised products, and having to deal with their awful customer service.

Hasn't OCZ typically been cheaper (I could be completely off base here...I just have some vague recollection of their SSDs being cheaper than equivalent-performing competition)?

For X amount of risk of failure, there is a Y amount of price discount that makes the product worth purchasing.

PUNCHITCHEWIE
Apr 4, 2009
IF I'M TALKING ABOUT FOOTBALL, IGNORE ME. I'M A FUCKING IDIOT.
I've never heard about all this hate for OCZ before (which I find kind of odd), but the only brand of RAM I've ever had that poo poo the bed was OCZ back in 2006 I think. Whenever something fails I never go back to that brand, ever. Don't even get me started on Razer.

Apparently I've been extraordinarily lucky with hard drives, over 20 years of building my own machines (still remember installing my first 80MB HD) and something like 75 spinner HDs and another five SSDs across maybe 30 desktops, home servers, laptops, NAS devices, HTPCs and I've never experienced any sort of drive failure. Now it's 2012 and everything is in the cloud anyway so it doesn't matter anymore.

Rollie Fingers
Jul 28, 2002

A few years ago, my OCZ power supply destroyed my graphics card, and four of the six OCZ memory sticks I went through failed after a couple of months of use. Recently, tech at my workplace installed an OCZ SSD on my work computer - despite me pleading with them that I'd rather use a 5400 RPM laptop drive - which failed after about a month.

I'll never ever give any money to that company again.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Thermopyle posted:

Hasn't OCZ typically been cheaper (I could be completely off base here...I just have some vague recollection of their SSDs being cheaper than equivalent-performing competition)?

For X amount of risk of failure, there is a Y amount of price discount that makes the product worth purchasing.

I can't say you're wrong, but there are some practical problems with that line of thought.

First, everyone's preferences for risk are different, so it's hard to turn calculated risk into a product recommendation that includes OCZ. Most people are risk averse, however, so the best "one size fits all" recommendation is to avoid OCZ given the risk premium and its associated likelihood of the labor and frustration of troubleshooting and RMA. That, or the discount would have to be significantly larger than it is.

Second, for the sale price of OCZ hardware to be economically efficient, the buyer must know all of the risks and costs associated with the transaction beyond the sticker price. And people would be much less likely to find out without folks like us saying "gently caress OCZ." Which ties into the third problem...

People suck at probability. They rampantly overestimate the likelihood that they will get lucky. Even if they know all the risks, people can and do take risks they would call others dumb for taking because they are irrationally optimistic. They also tend to underestimate the time and costs involved in recovering from when things go wrong. So decisions are made planned against a perfect world when, in reality, it rarely is.

So, in conclusion, gently caress OCZ.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Bokito posted:

Amazon Germany has the 256 GB Samsung 830 Desktop Upgrade Kit on sale for 179,90 Euro (0,7 Euro/GB!):
That's such an awesome drive for the money.

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

They were shady and had a terrible reputation for PC components even before they got into SSDs.
They've been pushing poo poo products since forever, and at this point anyone who willingly buys their stuff deserves whatever they get.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell

Factory Factory posted:

I can't say you're wrong,

I can't disagree with you, either!

Tunga
May 7, 2004

Grimey Drawer
It's also not even true that OCZ are cheaper. The Agility 3s are just about cheaper than an m4, and maybe the Petrol or whatever dumb name they gave the recent budget drives. The Vertex/Octanes are always more than an m4, and don't really perform better overall. There really is no good reason to buy an OCZ SSD. Unless US prices are wildly different.

Boten Anna
Feb 22, 2010

Tunga posted:

It's also not even true that OCZ are cheaper. The Agility 3s are just about cheaper than an m4, and maybe the Petrol or whatever dumb name they gave the recent budget drives. The Vertex/Octanes are always more than an m4, and don't really perform better overall. There really is no good reason to buy an OCZ SSD. Unless US prices are wildly different.

In my limited experience, OCZ drives tend to be about $20 cheaper than roughly equivalent Crucial ones in the US. It's tempting when SSD price per gigabyte is so high compared to disk drives, but it's really not worth it to get something that, you know, probably won't work.

future ghost
Dec 5, 2005

:byetankie:
Gun Saliva
Speaking of OCZ, my brother decided that he wanted my old Vertex2 after all. I've got it setup to do regular backups to the fileserver at least.


The new Samsung 830 I picked up benchmarks extremely fast in comparison, though the only difference I've really noticed so far is the sequential write speeds being holy-balls-faster.
The only thing that worries me is that the 4K reads/writes are slightly inconsistent in testing, although I'll check it again in a few days to let garbage collection run a bit.

e:

future ghost fucked around with this message at 05:11 on May 25, 2012

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Tunga posted:

It's also not even true that OCZ are cheaper. The Agility 3s are just about cheaper than an m4, and maybe the Petrol or whatever dumb name they gave the recent budget drives. The Vertex/Octanes are always more than an m4, and don't really perform better overall. There really is no good reason to buy an OCZ SSD. Unless US prices are wildly different.

There was that ridiculous deal last week where a 240GB Agility 3 was $148 or something and it came with a 32GB OCZ Petrol or some poo poo.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Boten Anna posted:

In my limited experience, OCZ drives tend to be about $20 cheaper than roughly equivalent Crucial ones in the US. It's tempting when SSD price per gigabyte is so high compared to disk drives, but it's really not worth it to get something that, you know, probably won't work.
Pretty much this. While it's true that for X risk, a discount of Y makes it worth it, the numbers don't match up well for OCZ. At release, OCZ was usually undercutting their competition only by $10-$20 or so on $200-$300 drives, so the discount was pretty minimal. The discount hasn't really gotten any larger as all the drives have slid down the price-scale, either. When you consider that most people don't take the time or effort to do a backup disk image (or backup at all, sadly), the cost of a disk failure is quite large. And now that the M4 and Samsung 830's are regularly taking sale-dips down into OCZ price territory, it's even harder to excuse buying them.

So, in conclusion, gently caress OCZ.

Tetraphagia
Jun 27, 2006

I picked up one of the Intel 330 180GB drives and installed it a few days ago. As I was installing Steam games and running Windows Updates, things seemed a little unstable, lots of Chrome and Explorer freezing up, but no blue screens. I ran a benchmark at the end of the first day and I got this (I actually ran it about 5 times because of the weird results):



Going over SATA II, so everything is about what I expected except for that final test. Installed the Intel SSD Tools, ran a full diagnostic scan (no errors), shut down the computer, came back the next day and re-ran the benchmark, got this:



Everything has been fine since then, but I also haven't really been stressing the system. I was debating RMAing just because of the weird early behavior, but now it seems like everything is back to normal? Am I paranoid thinking I should RMA this, or was it probably just a really weird fluke?

Endymion FRS MK1
Oct 29, 2011

I don't know what this thing is, and I don't care. I'm just tired of seeing your stupid newbie av from 2011.
I just got an m4 and did a quick benchmark, do these numbers look right? It seems fast, but this is my first SSD and I don't know if this is what I should be getting.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness
Pretty much, yeah.

mikeycon
Feb 22, 2012
I'm looking at purchasing a 240gb Mushkin SSD, anyone here have any experience with them.

This one in particular - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226237 240gb for 199.99

Tunga
May 7, 2004

Grimey Drawer
I have a 120GB Vertex 2 which I'm upgrading to a 256GB m4. The old drive will be donated to my brother (this is a "good" V2 from the early days but I'll make sure he knows the risks). What's the easiest way to do a secure erase on it to restore performance to original levels?

MOAR
Mar 6, 2012

Death! Put your jacket on or you'll get frostbite!

Tunga posted:

I have a 120GB Vertex 2 which I'm upgrading to a 256GB m4. The old drive will be donated to my brother (this is a "good" V2 from the early days but I'll make sure he knows the risks). What's the easiest way to do a secure erase on it to restore performance to original levels?

I've used "HDDErase" which is a DOS level eraser - it's worth looking at.

Wild EEPROM
Jul 29, 2011


oh, my, god. Becky, look at her bitrate.
Don't do that, it's not good for your ssd. Use an actual ssd erase program.

Parted magic can do it: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20115106-285/how-to-securely-erase-an-ssd-drive/

GreenBuckanneer
Sep 15, 2007

I have a 64gb kingston (SNV425-S2). I can't seem to find firmware updates for anything kingston, is there something out there? My friend said I should try one on the drive but I'm finding jack poo poo.

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TwoKnives
Dec 25, 2004

Horrible, horrible shoes!

Bokito posted:

Amazon Germany has the 256 GB Samsung 830 Desktop Upgrade Kit on sale for 179,90 Euro (0,7 Euro/GB!):

http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-MZ-7PC256D-EU-interne-6-0Gbps/dp/B005OK6VJ0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337883553&sr=8-2

They also ship to other European countries.

I ordered one but I got charged 185.95 before shipping. Not sure where the extra charge came from; I emailed them to find out.

Still a great deal regardless, thanks for posting it.

edit: Figured out that Germany have a lower VAT rate.

TwoKnives fucked around with this message at 13:13 on May 25, 2012

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