The SSD Megathread - Don't buy OCZ/Toshiba, Kingston, or Crucial drives, read the OP

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The SSD Megathread - Don't buy OCZ/Toshiba, Kingston, or Crucial drives, read the OP

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ufarn: May 30, 2009

priznat posted:

Use Steam Tool, it moves the files on to other drives while leaving symbolic links. Then when you want a game on the ssd again it can safer it back over.

Probably you could do something similar by hand for the other non-steam installs..

It's all on Steam these days. I just began wondering today, when I decided to download Battlefield 3 and saw the ridiculous file size. Made me wonder what's a sensible SSD size.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 02:32

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 08:35

LRADIKAL: Jun 10, 2001; Fun Shoe

A sensible SSD size is one that does not include your 500GB games folder.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 02:49

Strong Sauce: Jul 2, 2003; You know I am not really your father.

I found the deal on the Toshiba drive, in case anyone is curious or interested

http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/107854/ebay---512gb-toshiba-sata-iii-2.5-internal-solid-state-drive-pc-upgrade-kit-ssd

# ? Dec 1, 2013 02:53

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

BobHoward posted:

Error correction disabled? Nah. Whatever source said that is exaggerating or speculating from a position of considerable ignorance. Such an SSD would corrupt data all the time, even when it was brand new with no wear. Error correction is an absolute requirement, so much so that NAND media has extra storage dedicated to it. I found a circa 2004 Micron 2Gb NAND datasheet showing 64 bytes per 2K byte page, but I'm sure the overhead is much higher on modern flash process nodes.

I'm talking about the Sandforce RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Storage Elements) error-correction. This allows one NAND die worth of space to be dedicated for additional ECC data to handle bursts of errors beyond what the lower-level ECC can handle, rather than corrupting data. Drives with their capacity expressed in a power-of-two have this disabled, with the space that would have been used for ECC made available for user data. I'm not saying that the lack of RAISE is what caused these drives to fail, because in theory the lower-level ECC should be capable of handling the error rate from high-quality NAND. However, it is telling that Intel, SanDisk, and all other manufacturers with brands that try to associate with reliability released exclusively drives with RAISE ECC enabled. Only the brands that are typically associated with low-end discount RAM produced drives with RAISE disabled...and Toshiba, whom later recalled the drives they shipped in Macs. I think their choice with RAISE on this drive is likely to be only one of a series of choices they made that impact drive reliability.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 02:55

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

Jago posted:

A sensible SSD size is one that does not include your 500GB games folder.

I bought a 500GB SSD to install games on :downs:

# ? Dec 1, 2013 03:09

BobHoward: Feb 13, 2012; The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

Alereon posted:

I'm talking about the Sandforce RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Storage Elements) error-correction. (...) Only the brands that are typically associated with low-end discount RAM produced drives with RAISE disabled...and Toshiba, whom later recalled the drives they shipped in Macs. I think their choice with RAISE on this drive is likely to be only one of a series of choices they made that impact drive reliability.

Okay, now I get where you're coming from. But RAISE is kinda an enterprise level reliability feature, the equivalent of RAID-5 across all the flash die in the SSD. It's supposed to save your data in the face of physical failures -- pages, blocks, or even an entire flash die crapping out. You don't really need it for ordinary error correction on a drive where the flash media isn't failing, and if Toshiba shipped lots of dodgy flash die in Apple OEM SSDs they're kinda crazy. (Apple is, last I heard, the largest single buyer of flash memory which doesn't own its own flash memory fab, and Toshiba has long been one of their two main suppliers. If you're Toshiba, pissing Apple off is the last thing you want to do.)

# ? Dec 1, 2013 04:06

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

BobHoward posted:

Okay, now I get where you're coming from. But RAISE is kinda an enterprise level reliability feature, the equivalent of RAID-5 across all the flash die in the SSD. It's supposed to save your data in the face of physical failures -- pages, blocks, or even an entire flash die crapping out. You don't really need it for ordinary error correction on a drive where the flash media isn't failing, and if Toshiba shipped lots of dodgy flash die in Apple OEM SSDs they're kinda crazy. (Apple is, last I heard, the largest single buyer of flash memory which doesn't own its own flash memory fab, and Toshiba has long been one of their two main suppliers. If you're Toshiba, pissing Apple off is the last thing you want to do.)

Yeah the theory was that it wouldn't be needed on consumer devices with high quality NAND, but I think it's informative that both Intel and SanDisk kept RAISE enabled on all Sandforce products, even those made using their top quality NAND. I feel like if it didn't provide benefits for consumer drives Intel at the very least would have disabled it when they were doing their own extensive firmware development and validation in concert with Sandforce. The division between good manufacturer that left RAISE enabled and bad manufacturers that turned it off is a bit too stark to be explained by a few companies playing it safe in my opinion. OCZ kept it enabled across their models, but they desperately needed it to deal with the error rates on the NAND they shipped.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 04:26

curried lamb of God: Aug 31, 2001; we are all Marwinners

The Samsung 840 Pro in my 2011 MBP died yesterday (HoTS link here) and I'm unable to RMA the drive at the moment since I'm living out of the country, so I'm in the market for a new SSD. I'm tempted to get another 840 Pro, but the OP recommends the Intel 530 (or something Sandforce-based) as the best drive for Macs. Is there a noticeable performance difference between the 840 Pro and 530? My workload isn't too heavy - the most taxing software I run is Ableton Live and a bunch of plug-ins (Maschine, Massive, Reaktor, etc).

# ? Dec 1, 2013 19:06

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

surrender posted:

The Samsung 840 Pro in my 2011 MBP died yesterday (HoTS link here) and I'm unable to RMA the drive at the moment since I'm living out of the country, so I'm in the market for a new SSD. I'm tempted to get another 840 Pro, but the OP recommends the Intel 530 (or something Sandforce-based) as the best drive for Macs. Is there a noticeable performance difference between the 840 Pro and 530? My workload isn't too heavy - the most taxing software I run is Ableton Live and a bunch of plug-ins (Maschine, Massive, Reaktor, etc).

If TRIM is enabled and you aren't overfilling the drive (beyond 80%) then no, there wouldn't be a meaningful difference. Macs are VERY sensitive to I/O consistency (requests all being completed in the same amount of time, versus some quickly and some slowly), and Samsung drives become very inconsistent in those conditions. Sandforce drives maintain consistency in cases where other drives would falter. If you avoid those cases (which you should be trying to do anyway), they will feel very similar.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 19:27

curried lamb of God: Aug 31, 2001; we are all Marwinners

Alereon posted:

If TRIM is enabled and you aren't overfilling the drive (beyond 80%) then no, there wouldn't be a meaningful difference. Macs are VERY sensitive to I/O consistency (requests all being completed in the same amount of time, versus some quickly and some slowly), and Samsung drives become very inconsistent in those conditions. Sandforce drives maintain consistency in cases where other drives would falter. If you avoid those cases (which you should be trying to do anyway), they will feel very similar.

All right, thanks for the advice. I would've liked to upgrade to 480GB, but the Intel 530 at that capacity is pretty much non-existent and the 840 Pro is still over $400. I guess I'll order the 530 240 GB model.

I didn't have any performance complaints with the 840 Pro, but I wasn't close to overfilling the drive and had TRIM enabled. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the Congo for work, so RMAing my current drive isn't really an option since the only international shipping option (DHL) will cost as much as a new drive itself. I have a colleague coming from the States in January, so I'll just order a new drive and have it shipped to him.

# ? Dec 1, 2013 20:08

John Lightning: Mar 10, 2012

At 9 AM PST tomorrow Dec 2 the Sandisk Extreme II 240 gb and 480 gb will go on sale on Amazon's lightning deals. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...rd_p=1673797982

I don't know how much cheaper they will cost but they are pretty nice SSDs. Obviously no where near as cheap as the EVO though.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 04:02

TITTIEKISSER69: Mar 19, 2005; SAVE THE BEES
PLANT MORE TREES
CLEAN THE SEAS
KISS TITTIESS

Space Gopher posted:

What are you trying to do?

If you're trying to keep some ancient server or embedded system alive, a Sandforce drive would probably do OK. They have decent garbage collection even without TRIM support. TRIM helps performance, but it's not a live-or-die item.

If you're trying to build anything that you'd want to describe as "fast," you're better off starting with a new computer. SSDs are like magic on modern desktops and laptops because everything else in a modern system runs much faster than mechanical storage. They still help older computers, but the performance improvement (and the potential gains from working TRIM) is much less pronounced. If you're satisfied with the performance you can get out of traditional PCI, keep in mind that even a mediocre current SSD, running at degraded performance thanks to being without TRIM, will still be held way back for both reads and writes by the PCI bus itself.

I have an old PC running Vista for which I'd like to use an SSD. I currently have a Samsung EVO ordered for it, but I'm willing to switch it for a Sandforce-based drive.

With that being said, I need something to plug it into. The board has four SATA ports for Sil3114 RAID, but I have spinny drives for those. I can use a card for PCI or for PCI-X. Can I get suggestions for a (preferably TRIM-compatible) card?

Also, I can and probably will upgrade this system to Windows 7.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 07:04

USMC503: Jan 15, 2012; For satisfactory performance while under the effects of hostile enemy alcohol.

Unless I missed it in the OP, Corsair SSDs aren't discussed much. Is this 240 GB Corsair Force LS for $160 better than the $150 250 GB Samsung EVO posted earlier?

I know Corsair tends to be a good company, but I'm curious if there is a reason they aren't discussed much/a reason why one would pay more for a smaller drive.

e: For clarity, the Corsair SSD linked is going on sale for Cyber Monday for $160.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 07:29

Lovable Luciferian: Jul 10, 2007; Flashing my onyx masonic ring at 5 cent wing n trivia night at Dinglers Sports Bar - Ozma

USMC503 posted:

Unless I missed it in the OP, Corsair SSDs aren't discussed much. Is this 240 GB Corsair Force LS for $160 better than the $150 250 GB Samsung EVO posted earlier?

I know Corsair tends to be a good company, but I'm curious if there is a reason they aren't discussed much/a reason why one would pay more for a smaller drive.

e: For clarity, the Corsair SSD linked is going on sale for Cyber Monday for $160.

The 840 EVO is the superior drive.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 12:37

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Lovable Luciferian posted:

The 840 EVO is the superior drive.

And on that note, both the 840 Evo and Sandisk Extreme II are going on flash sale on Amazon in 4 and 2 hours respectively. The 840 Evo is already a stupidly good deal at 289$ for the 500 gig model. I'd expect the 1tb model to drop below 500$ when the sale hits.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 15:39

abraham linksys: Sep 6, 2010

Gwaihir posted:

And on that note, both the 840 Evo and Sandisk Extreme II are going on flash sale on Amazon in 4 and 2 hours respectively. The 840 Evo is already a stupidly good deal at 289$ for the 500 gig model. I'd expect the 1tb model to drop below 500$ when the sale hits.

Specifically it looks like this is for the 240 and 480 GB Sandisk Extreme II (12PM EST) and the 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO (1:40 EST). Which is a bummer, because I was really hoping the 250 GB EVO would go lower :argh:

# ? Dec 2, 2013 15:54

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

When they put the Intel 530 on flash sale some other capacities got price drops as well. You could get lucky. The 250 gig is already cheap as hell anyhow, drat.

(I just replaced my original SF1500 OCZ Vertex LE with the 500 gig evo, I figured it was time what with OCZ going bankrupt and all. It was still a good drive and all, even if it's replacement cost lest for a 5x capacity increase!)

# ? Dec 2, 2013 16:00

extravadanza: Oct 19, 2007

abraham linksys posted:

Specifically it looks like this is for the 240 and 480 GB Sandisk Extreme II (12PM EST) and the 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO (1:40 EST). Which is a bummer, because I was really hoping the 250 GB EVO would go lower

Seems like it's going to be a really good deal, especially if you can pair it up with the Amex $25 off $75 purchase deal. I think I will pick up a 250gb Sandisk to be home to games, while my 2 year old 120gb one handles windows and other stuff. Possibly upgrade to windows 8 sometime in the future and install that on the 250gb, and clear the 120gb.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 16:48

kaschei: Oct 25, 2005

I just grabbed the Sandisk Extreme II 250GB, I'm wondering why in the OP it's listed alongside the 840 Pro as "great high-end" but people seem more generally excited to see the 840 Evo at a similar price to the Sandisk? I can see for the Intel that there are varying opinions on Sandforce, is there anything I should know about the Sandisk?

# ? Dec 2, 2013 18:28

DarkJC: Jul 6, 2010

kaschei posted:

I just grabbed the Sandisk Extreme II 250GB, I'm wondering why in the OP it's listed alongside the 840 Pro as "great high-end" but people seem more generally excited to see the 840 Evo at a similar price to the Sandisk? I can see for the Intel that there are varying opinions on Sandforce, is there anything I should know about the Sandisk?

I think there's more hype for the EVO because it's right in the sweet spot for price/performance under normal pricing conditions. Black friday deals mess with this of course, but that's probably why you see more EVO talk. The Extreme II is a great drive, you're not missing anything.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 18:36

Gwaihir: Dec 8, 2009; Hair Elf

Yea, the Extreme II is still the highest performing drive on Anand's charts at least. It's just slightly more expensive, and for a normal desktop user, we'll literally never notice the increased performance from the Extreme II over the 840 Evo. With Amazon pricing being what it is, the Extreme II is an insanely good deal right now.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 18:42

Anti-Hero: Feb 26, 2004

Is the Extreme II no longer on flash sale on Amazon? It's not showing up on the front page under the Cyber Monday sales, though the 840 1TB is listed as an upcoming sale.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 19:13

curried lamb of God: Aug 31, 2001; we are all Marwinners

Ended up snagging the 480GB Sandisk drive for $279, plus $25 off for using Amex! Worst case scenario, if it doesn't work out, I'll just replace it with the RMA'd 840 Pro.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 19:37

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Jesup, the 1TB EVO for $490 on Amazon.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 20:31

rage2kk2: Aug 21, 2007

Just wondering if I should be concerned at all about the inflated Power on Count I'm seeing here:

Chipset drivers/BIOS etc are updated as much as possible and speeds are normal for SATA300. There's just no way the drive was powered on that many times. Other drives in this system report normal counts. :shrug:

# ? Dec 2, 2013 20:55

Kild: Apr 24, 2010

Anti-Hero posted:

Is the Extreme II no longer on flash sale on Amazon? It's not showing up on the front page under the Cyber Monday sales, though the 840 1TB is listed as an upcoming sale.

It ended unfortunately

# ? Dec 2, 2013 21:01

Anti-Hero: Feb 26, 2004

Kild posted:

It ended unfortunately

I jumped on the 1TB EVO for $490, so it's all good.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 21:09

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

rage2kk2 posted:

Just wondering if I should be concerned at all about the inflated Power on Count I'm seeing here:

Chipset drivers/BIOS etc are updated as much as possible and speeds are normal for SATA300. There's just no way the drive was powered on that many times. Other drives in this system report normal counts.

I have a pretty high power on count for my Kingston 3K - I attribute it to my PC having a 60 minute sleep timer which gets triggered when I go to work and multiple times when I'm home too.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 21:25

rage2kk2: Aug 21, 2007

Josh Lyman posted:

I have a pretty high power on count for my Kingston 3K - I attribute it to my PC having a 60 minute sleep timer which gets triggered when I go to work and multiple times when I'm home too.

I use the same timeout for sleep as you do. Even with a power on/off cycle of 24 times in 24 hours x 30 days you get 720 cycles. I've only had the drive for 4 months, so in 120 days this drive is reporting it's been power cycled ~6800 times, an average of being powered on/off 56 times a day unless I butchered the math.

Considering my Old Crucial M4 from July of last year that's in this system reports 3603 Power Cycles I'm inclined to believe something isn't quite right. This is an old motherboard so who knows.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 22:07

MJP: Jun 17, 2007; Are you looking at me Senpai?; Grimey Drawer

So my new boss is contending that OCZ drives were darn good drives for the money, up to their glorious end. I had success with my Kingston and hit up this thread for some sources to counteract his opinion, but only saw the notes in the OP.

Anyone got some good scathing indictments against OCZ that I can throw back at him?

# ? Dec 2, 2013 23:00

Rexxed: May 1, 2010; Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

rage2kk2 posted:

I use the same timeout for sleep as you do. Even with a power on/off cycle of 24 times in 24 hours x 30 days you get 720 cycles. I've only had the drive for 4 months, so in 120 days this drive is reporting it's been power cycled ~6800 times, an average of being powered on/off 56 times a day unless I butchered the math.

Considering my Old Crucial M4 from July of last year that's in this system reports 3603 Power Cycles I'm inclined to believe something isn't quite right. This is an old motherboard so who knows.

It's likely the motherboard, my 840 Pro shows a power on count of 4 with 1446 hours of use. I think that is off by a few but it should still be under 20. Perhaps the power on count in SMART is just not very accurate.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 23:03

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

MJP posted:

So my new boss is contending that OCZ drives were darn good drives for the money, up to their glorious end. I had success with my Kingston and hit up this thread for some sources to counteract his opinion, but only saw the notes in the OP.

Anyone got some good scathing indictments against OCZ that I can throw back at him?

Here's the original blog post (by a competitor) that revealed they used defective flash memory. Note that Googling this will find some articles from around the same time skeptical that this is really a problem, but it was proven that this wasn't just a competitor spreading FUD and that Spectek NAND is garbage. Check out past editions of the Hardware.fr hardware reliability survey for more statistical backup. Reliability got better near the end for the same reason that they went bankrupt: they sold so many drives there wasn't enough defective flash out there for them to buy, so they had to buy untested flash in bulk and validate it themselves. The key to me is how many OCZ drives have return rates >40%, which probably indicates every one of these models failed in service. At small numbers it's anecdotal, but the computer store my friends work at have experienced 100% return rates of two SSD models: the OCZ Petrol and Crucial V4.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 23:11

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Rexxed posted:

It's likely the motherboard, my 840 Pro shows a power on count of 4 with 1446 hours of use. I think that is off by a few but it should still be under 20. Perhaps the power on count in SMART is just not very accurate.

Crucial drives are not very good with Link Power Management. Every time the system idles the SATA connection, the drive powers down thinking the system went to sleep. Not a big deal, since it comes up again so quickly.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 23:18

Storysmith: Dec 31, 2006

So I have an unusual use case and I was wondering what SSDs would best fit it. I have two small SBCs, an Udoo and a Cubieboard. Think "slightly more advanced Raspberry Pi." Both run off of internal microSD cards, which are surprisingly slow even for UHS-1 speed rating.

Both have SATA connectors, but since they're relatively slow ARM processors I don't think I need screaming performance, and since they're not going into heavy disk I/O uses (one will be a controller for a 3D printer, the other an embedded development environment) I'm mostly looking for a more responsive desktop environment.

So yeah, any recommendations? Ideally, anything under $150? I'm assuming I want to avoid the earlier non-SATA 3 models for reliability concerns, but these things are never going to be speed demons.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 13:19

lkz: May 1, 2009; Soiled Meat

Welp, looks like it happened after all. Although it is on the condition that Toshiba funds OCZ for the time being.

Toshiba Acquires OCZ's Assets for $35 million.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 15:15

Rexxed: May 1, 2010; Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

Storysmith posted:

So I have an unusual use case and I was wondering what SSDs would best fit it. I have two small SBCs, an Udoo and a Cubieboard. Think "slightly more advanced Raspberry Pi." Both run off of internal microSD cards, which are surprisingly slow even for UHS-1 speed rating.

Both have SATA connectors, but since they're relatively slow ARM processors I don't think I need screaming performance, and since they're not going into heavy disk I/O uses (one will be a controller for a 3D printer, the other an embedded development environment) I'm mostly looking for a more responsive desktop environment.

So yeah, any recommendations? Ideally, anything under $150? I'm assuming I want to avoid the earlier non-SATA 3 models for reliability concerns, but these things are never going to be speed demons.

Any SSD is going to be fast compared to other drives. Since you'll be using them with Operating Systems without TRIM you should look at a Sandforce based drive like the Intel 530 or Intel 330. Unfortunately the great deals for those are mostly over, but if you're in the US there are still okay deals on the 530 on amazon, at $124 for 180gb and $159 for 240gb.
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-2-5-Inc...words=intel+530

# ? Dec 3, 2013 15:42

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

lkz posted:

Welp, looks like it happened after all. Although it is on the condition that Toshiba funds OCZ for the time being.

Toshiba Acquires OCZ's Assets for $35 million.

How long until we get OCZ branded HDDs? :v:

# ? Dec 3, 2013 16:27

EoRaptor: Sep 13, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Josh Lyman posted:

How long until we get OCZ branded HDDs?

I wonder what Toshiba's game is here. OCZ'z name is poison now, and Toshiba makes their own (not very good) SSD's.

I guess they could just want an experienced licensee for the sometimes tricky sandforce controllers, but I honestly don't think that's worth anywhere near 32 million, especially considering that employees are likely to bail or already have bailed.

Toshiba also has a perfectly serviceable distribution channel and market presence, so they don't need that, either.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 16:40

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

OCZ does have a high-performance controller division, though they don't seem to have been able to sort out their firmware issues before going under. If you are a NAND manufacturer making drives with your own controllers and memory is compelling because all the money goes to you.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 16:48

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 08:35

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

EoRaptor posted:

I wonder what Toshiba's game is here. OCZ'z name is poison now, and Toshiba makes their own (not very good) SSD's.

I guess they could just want an experienced licensee for the sometimes tricky sandforce controllers, but I honestly don't think that's worth anywhere near 32 million, especially considering that employees are likely to bail or already have bailed.

Toshiba also has a perfectly serviceable distribution channel and market presence, so they don't need that, either.

The deal specifically required that OCZ's employees be kept on, so I'm thinking part of the idea is that they are acquiring Indilinx for $3 million more than OCZ paid, and getting a free OCZ for their trouble (plus a large warranty liability). Toshiba's controllers are unique and validated out the wazoo, but they are not great performers. Meanwhile OCZ's IP has unique high-performance controllers that desperately need validation. The last exciting non-OEM SSD Toshiba was inside of was some old Kingston drive that was a surprisingly not-lovely drive despite being cheap; this is potential for Toshiba to bring the fight back to Samsung's high-performance, high-validation drives.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 16:52

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The SSD Megathread - Don't buy OCZ/Toshiba, Kingston, or Crucial drives, read the OP

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