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

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Farking Bastage posted:

This is from a Dell Latitude E6410. I'm pretty sure it's only a SATA2 controller in this one, but I've had difficulty verifying.

http://i.imgur.com/HEzZP.jpg

good? bad? indifferent?

The E6410 has the QM57 chipset with is only SATA II, and those speeds are fine.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2012 00:38

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 15:46

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

A fair few people have been reporting a particular showstopping problem with the M4 on the Crucial forums:
http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/0x00000f4-error-on-M4-64GB/td-p/76392

Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jan 2, 2012

# ¿ Jan 2, 2012 04:51

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

But the only reason I can see to do that would be a portable drive you're trying to share between a between a Windows and Mac (or whatever) system, so it'll be USB-slow anyway.

If you're only sharing a device between MacOS and Winows machines, why wouldn't you be using exFAT already?

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 03:50

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

fletcher posted:

Does ANYBODY have anything good to say about OCZ? I feel with the amount of people getting burned by them a warning should be in the title of this thread.

I haven't been burned by them (got vertex 2s with several thousand POH), but their continuted sleight-of-hand bullshit and poor pricing means that there's no chance of me buying any more of them.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2012 09:31

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

I'm feeling pretty special today, finally had an OCZ drive die on me! That's about 1 failure per 15000 POH

# ¿ Apr 30, 2012 02:58

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

evil_bunnY posted:

POH doesn't matter too much on NAND.

Sorry for giving you the impression that I thought it mattered.

I was just surprised at getting two years' worth of work out of OCZ drives in my home lab before something went wrong.

# ¿ May 1, 2012 01:57

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Vertigus posted:

Stumbled on this thread, read the title, and then read this post and cancelled my $150 OCZ order on Amazon and bought this.

Good job.

you have chosen...wisely

# ¿ May 1, 2012 05:19

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

Would that apply if it was a Marvell drive?

The Marvell controller doesn't do much to mitigate the slipshod job OCZ probably did on the drive's firmware, board design and assembly.

# ¿ May 2, 2012 03:51

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

fookolt posted:

RAM is a lot like hard drive space: it won't stay unused for long.

For example, running a Win7 VM from a RAM drive is a legit business use for excess RAM:

# ¿ May 8, 2012 14:30

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/runcore-intros-invincible-ssd-with-physical-self-destruct-feature/15892.html

Now this is interesting. A self-destructing SSD that overvolts the NAND and fries it, getting rid of "sensitive" material. Wonder if they realize what 99% of their market is going to become though?

An SSD that munches data? They'll be sued by OCZ for infringing intellectual property.

# ¿ May 17, 2012 08:20

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

Hahah what the gently caress

When we had Blackberries I had a handful of 4GB MicroSD cards and I could have made a 32GB drive out of those.

I have an irrational desire to get one of those now, even though I know filling it with all those old 2GB SD cards lying around would give crap capacity and crap write speeds.

# ¿ May 18, 2012 02:19

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Civil posted:

Sorry for posting the tiger direct deal, guys, I didn't know they were that lovely. Amazon is down to $210 for the drive, and is a much better vendor.

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-CT256M4SSD2/dp/B004W2JL2A

loving Amazon will no longer ship these to Australian addresses. The cheapest local price here is about US$295, except no-one's got any stock.

# ¿ May 19, 2012 11:45

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

4 Day Weekend posted:

Buy from Amazon or Crucial directly. Shipping is cheap and fast.

Amazon themselves won't ship Crucial SSDs (and a lot of other hardware now) to Australian addresses any more - I tried on the weekend. Some of the other retailers who have storefronts on Amazon will.

The Dissonant posted:

Any Aussie goons have recommendations for good places to order SSDs (in particular, the Crucial M4)? MSY only seems to have Intel.

We're basically screwed if we want an M4 in Australia, the cheapest on staticice is $299 and no-one's got any stock at that price. MSY do have those Sandisk Extreme drives for $248, which aren't bad value for money.

Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 00:10 on May 22, 2012

# ¿ May 22, 2012 00:07

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

Is there a to use an Expresscard SSD anymore, unless it's a last resort?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161554

This one apparently has a JMicron controller so it's not that fast, but do they make fast ones? Is Expresscard capable of SATA 3.0 speeds?

Expresscard v1/v2 are respectively 2.5 or 5Gbit/s, so it's not that bad speed-wise.

It might be nice if you wanted an SSD in a laptop that didn't have an optical bay you could put a 2.5 inch SSD in, I suppose.

At that price it's not an attractive proposition.

# ¿ May 31, 2012 06:17

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

General_Failure posted:

Anyone recommend where I can buy an SSD from in Australia? Besides eBay that is. And if you answer with Amazon, unless something has changed and they are actually shipping more than a limited subset of items with horrific postage, please feel free to punch yourself in the genitals repeatedly.

Yeah, gently caress Amazon.

Use http://staticice.com.au/ to find the cheapest thing in your area.

MSY have the 240GB Sandisk Extreme frives for $248, which is about as good as you're going to get in Australia

# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 00:45

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

The M4 is rated at 40GB per day for 5 years

That's pretty impressive - the Intel 520 series are only rated what amounts to 20GB/day for 5 years.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2012 01:37

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

General_Failure posted:

edit: In case you are curious:

Yes it's as cheesy as hell. But I know what I'm doing.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ will ship to Australia, and they will send a 256GB Crucial M4 to Australia for about A$232 all in.

These guys got my business after Amazon decided they didn't want my money.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 04:18

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Alereon posted:

Intel has announced pricecuts across all of their drives, along with a new SSD 330 240GB for $199. This takes their prices from "ridiculous" to "a moderate premium", which is much more fair. Now if only Samsung would move decisively under the $1/GB mark...

Has anyone seen these reductions show un in retail listings yet?

# ¿ Jul 17, 2012 02:59

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Space Gopher posted:

If it helps, folding@home is 95% epeen, 3% distributed computing research project, and maybe 1-2% actual medical research.

I feel kind of bad for the people who get into it in a big way because they think that it'll help cure their mum's cancer. It does produce useful basic research, but this is far removed from actual clinical applications.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2012 01:25

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

You Am I posted:

Doing virus scans of SSDs are awesome as well

Doing pretty much anything on an SSD is awesome (unless it's an OCZ drive)

# ¿ Aug 16, 2012 03:17

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

mik posted:

The 320 uses an Intel controller, while the 330 uses a Sandforce one. Not that the latter implies lower reliability necessarily, but it generally explains the former's higher cost.

IIRC the 320 uses 34nm flash and has greater overprovisioning, which may account for some of the price difference.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2012 02:22

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Heads up to .au goons - MSY have the 512GB 830 for $399.

edit: the Adelaide branch doesn't any more, I got the last one.

Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Nov 9, 2012

# ¿ Nov 9, 2012 01:23

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Factory Factory posted:

IIRC, that has to do with very-small-write sizes. Enterprise SSDs absolutely blow at 512 byte or smaller I/O, but do very well at page-size or larger I/O. Oracle's SwingBench focuses a lot on very small I/O.

Do Oracle DBs actually do that many 512 byte writes, or is it just a legacy benchmark from the days when 512 bytes was standard?

# ¿ Nov 10, 2012 01:02

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

dpbjinc posted:

Good news: They fixed the Crucial m4 bug. Bad news: It's only for HP customers right now.

hmm....we've got some 2500-odd lenovos with that same C400 drive in them. Every time I power the machine off will be so much more exciting.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2012 00:54

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

HorseDickSandwich posted:

Thanks for the replies. I saw in the OP something about avoiding a certain Intel drive so I sort of blocked it from my mind. I know Intel is a reliable brand and from what I've seen of reviews, most people seem to like this drive.

That's Intel's new 335 series 'budget' drive, and apparently the problem is that it's over-reporting of write/erase cycles.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6462/intel-explains-20nm-nand-endurance-concerns-on-the-ssd-335

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 06:12

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Bob Morales posted:

Dang it's fast. It's also a power-hog, expensive, and it's made by OCZ.

But at least there's a 5-year warranty.

Given their current trajectory, I'll be surprised if OCZ (the company) are around in 5 years

# ¿ Nov 28, 2012 04:44

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

rscott posted:

That's at a Queue Depth of 32, which is a pretty heavy usage scenario so maybe their controller just wasn't designed for that kind of performance scenario. I'd be interested in seeing how it does at lower QDs compared to other controllers.

Hitting the SATA queue depth with an SSD on a desktop would have to be a bit of an edge case, wouldn't it?

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 02:22

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

SourKraut posted:

Anyone know roughly what the lifespan is for the Samsung 830s? I received my used 830 from Amazon (Warehouse deals, woo!) and SSD Magician is saying that it's health is "good", with a total bytes written (TBW) of 400 GB.

I recall finding a datasheet once for them and it was in the order of 36-72TBW (depending on drive size) under the relevant JDEC standard for calculating write endurance, which is far tougher than 99% of real-world desktop use cases. Buggered if I can find it now.

edit: start reading back from about page 218 of the thread HalloKitty linked

Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Feb 11, 2013

# ¿ Feb 11, 2013 00:18

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

BobHoward posted:

Broken by design, always has been. SATA is a loving hack, just one which happens to mostly work reasonably well. Did you know that SATA retains literal register-level compatibility with 1982 IBM PC hard drive controllers, just so that vendors too loving lazy to update BIOSes could keep booting ancient operating systems on modern SATA HW?

That's PCs for you, 35 years of hacks to retain backwards compatibility. A 4GHz CPU made in 2014 still starts up in 8088 real mode when it turns on, just like the original IBM PC.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2014 01:41

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

echinopsis posted:

thanks.. I mean I can buy it here in NZ but the first link on eBay for example was a good $40 Cheaper than the cheapest [according to price website] one available here

Do Amazon ship to NZ? I'm on the western isle (Perth) and just priced up a 500GB Evo and with shipping and exchange rates it was still $60 cheaper than any Australian retailer

# ¿ Jun 6, 2014 03:15

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

Torabi posted:

Has there been any word about an 850 EVO too? Since then I might as well wait for that to come out before buying my first SSD.

If you haven't bought an SSD by now, there's no time like the present. With any luck the models apporaching end-of-sale will get really cheap as vendors clear out stock for the new models. For example, I got a 512GB Samsung 830 for AUD $399 back in Q1 2013 just as they were being EOS, which is less than what the 840 Pro goes for now.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2014 13:42

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 15:46

Mr Chips: Jun 27, 2007; Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?

td4guy posted:

Leave your swap file the way it is, default. Don't worry about anything.

Especially if you're running a modern OS. I'm typing this on a Win 8.1 box with 32GBbytes of RAM and pagefile.sys is ~3Gbytes

I will never call them gibibytes

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 08:42

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