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

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Umm, should my SSD have a pattern like this? :ohdear:

# ¿ May 14, 2012 06:54

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:14

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Space Gopher posted:

but a modern SSD will still probably outlast any mechanical drive you buy at the same time, not to mention its own useful life as a storage device.

When I was looking into whether to disable defrag for an SSD (consensus: do not defrag), I came across some comments about SSD's lasting longer the HDD's for most consumer applications. Assuming a HDD lasts for at least 5 years without any problems, maybe 7 years before you replace it, will an SSD really last longer?

# ¿ May 16, 2012 07:08

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

balakadaka posted:

Thanks for the response on this. I had thought buying a board in 2011 would have newfangled AHCI support whoops!

But the nForce 630a was released in September 2007. :psyduck:

# ¿ May 16, 2012 16:21

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

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

# ¿ May 24, 2012 07:04

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:

# ¿ May 24, 2012 21:34

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

ASRock Z77 Extreme4, Windows 7, connected to port 1 (Caviar Black is port 0), both are the Intel SATA III controllers, old drive was the Caviar Black 1TB

I have a Kingston HyperX hooked up to a Z77 Extreme 4 as well, and cold boot to login screen is about 10 seconds. I don't think AHCI mode would affect boot speeds, but you should make sure that's enabled anyway.

Do you have it plugged into the grey ports next to the black ports or the border grey ports? You want to use the grey ports next to the black ports; the others are on the ASMedia controller and should boot slower.

Josh Lyman fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jun 4, 2012

# ¿ Jun 4, 2012 06:47

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

Corsair is coming out with a new line of drives in July

I'm a tad surprised. The read numbers are basically identical to the OCZ Vertex 4 (Indilinx-branded Marvell chip), but 370MB/s advertised sequential write is much lower. With the 1.4RC firmware, I tested a Vertex 4 that easily cleared 400MB/s sequential write.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2012 22:38

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Fuschia tude posted:

Specifically, how bad is a non-OCZ Sandforce drive these days? I've used a Kingston V+200 in my laptop for two months now, and it's been pretty great.

Ignoring the whole OCZ side of the equation, my impression is that Sandforce never had a failure problem per se; they had a BSOD when coming out of hibernation problem. That is, you never lost your data; you would just get very annoying BSOD's.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2012 15:20

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

The only thing that can console me about the Samsung 830 being $90 today when I bought a Kingston HyperX 3K for $90 AFTER REBATE a couple weeks ago and sending the rebate out Monday is that the Kingston still benchmarks faster in the majority of my usage scenarios. :smith:

I remember thinking that prices would stop falling once the Samsung 830 hits $90. Maybe now the question is when the 256GB version hits $150, though I don't have much need for another one. Ugh, now if 3TB HDD's would be $100 again.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2012 20:13

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Alereon posted:

HDD failure rates have been pretty consistent between brands, models, and capacities for quite some time, with the notable exceptions of Seagate's firmware issues (I think it's been long enough that we can just call it "consistently lovely firmware") and the occasional bad model.

From what I've seen, that Seagate firmware issue was the result of a minor oversight which was hard to pin down and they had a mishap releasing the "fix", but all is now well. I know this is the SSD thread, but I'm looking to buy a $50 HDD to replace my laptop's failing HDD, and my options are pretty much this Seagate and this Western Digital.

Josh Lyman fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jun 22, 2012

# ¿ Jun 22, 2012 07:02

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Nibble posted:

http://slickdeals.net/f/4854654-128...u6#post51500010

Samsung 830 128GB on sale at Newegg for $89.99 again, promo code EMCYTZT1880. Got one for my laptop last time they did this deal, time to get one for my desktop

Man, I really need to unsubscribe from this thread. I bought a Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB for $90 over a month and a half ago, and while I probably would have taken the Samsung 830 over it, there's really no point in me buying another SSD at this point.

But so tempting.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 18:02

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Alereon posted:

OCZ has announced that their upcoming Barefoot 3 controller has taped out, and that they expect to begin selling their drives between April-June of 2013. Of course, this should be treated with immense skepticism, as their previous controller launch turned out to be a hoax (the Everest controller, which was a relabeled Marvell controller).

"Initial specifications indicate that Barefoot 3 will support a significant performance increase over our current products and as its primary IT blocks are now licensed from a third party, it provides additional incremental cost benefits to OCZ," noted Mr. Petersen."

IT blocks are licensed from a third party? Sounds like another "custom firmware" situation.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2012 04:24

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

underlig posted:

Guess what, the ssd from the t61 doesn't boot on the other laptop either. (this laptop is NOT running sata-2, but controller-speed shoulnd't affect the drive beeing detected or not, should it?)

Controller speed affecting a drive being detected is akin to blaming a LAN that's only 10mbps instead of 10/100 for DHCP acquisition issues/slowness. In other words, it's probably that hacked BIOS.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2012 10:51

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Factory Factory posted:

I'm not sure what to make of OCZ here. They've released a new branch of firmware for the Vertex 4, with version numbers 1.4 and 1.5. The difference from pre-1.4 to 1.5 is a more-than-doubling, almost 2.5x, increase in sequential write speeds, as well as taking care of some remaining low-queue-depth issues the drives had when AnandTech first reviewed them. The updates also improve garbage collection aggressiveness. Downside: flashing the firmware is destructive; it erases the drive.

So, good on OCZ for fixing many of the firmware flaws in its flagship drive and making a fast drive faster? The thing still has compatibility and stability problems at the firmware level, and it hasn't been out there long enough to see if there are QC issues yet.

Destructive flashes are the laziest thing ever. :colbert:

It's part of the reason I returned my Vertex 4 even though the 1.4RC killed on benchmarks.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2012 23:16

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

Arstechnica has a Samsung 840 review up -

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/samsungs-840-series-ssd-reviewed/12/

How convenient that Arstechnica gets a sample of the regular 840 and AnandTech gets a sample of the 840 Pro.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2012 15:43

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Alereon posted:

but in basic terms you need something that does not have a power-of-two size, is SATA600, and isn't OCZ.

Don't you mean is a power of two? As in 120/128GB and 240/256GB but not 160GB?

# ¿ Feb 6, 2013 07:07

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

Anandtech has an article up about switching their forums and site servers over to all-SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6824/inside-anandtech-2013-allssd-architecture

Intel X25-E's for the database servers and X25-M G2's for the application servers.

He mentions they partitioned the 160GB X25-M G2's down to 120GB to maximize their lifespan. How does that help? :confused:

As a sidenote, AnandTech is my go-to for in depth technical reviews; it's a shame their forums are so bad.

Josh Lyman fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Mar 19, 2013

# ¿ Mar 19, 2013 22:10

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

I just got a surplus Thinkpad X201 with 160GB Intel X25-M G2 that's on Win7. I have a SandForce driver in my desktop so I'm familiar with the basic SSD "maintenance", but as far as the X25 goes, I just need to install Intel SSD Toolbox and run TRIM every so often right?

# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 18:04

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

I've read that you should try to keep something like 10% space empty for maximum performance. Should you still do this if you have a SSD that sets aside space for provisioning, e.g. 120GB or 240GB?

# ¿ May 25, 2013 02:23

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Dogen posted:

So can someone who is smarter than me tell me where this fits with the 840 Pro? I mean new product reliability caveats aside, is there any reason to buy a Pro over an Evo? Because I could spare the $370 for a 500 gig drive...

The Evo is just the new version of the non-Pro, so the same caveats should apply.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2013 17:19

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Got money to burn and a need for speed?

"The newly announced NVMe SSD XS1715 reads data at a mind-numbing 3,000 MB/s. Hitting these absurd numbers isn't without a caveat, though, as this SSD won't run on a SATA-6 port -- it requires a PCIe hookup. When these speed demons do arrive, they'll be available in 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB sizes."

http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/18/samsung-enterprise-ssd-NVMe-XS1715/

# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 11:54

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

The Old Reader is down for a couple days because they had 4 separate SSDs fail: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56209408824/important-update

# ¿ Jul 23, 2013 15:57

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

bull3964 posted:

It would be nice if they wouldn't have mentioned what kind of SSDs they were using.

I actually tweeted them to ask for the model.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2013 17:07

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Alereon posted:

Anandtech's Samsung 840 EVO review is up, it looks like they tested all capacities: 120, 250, 500, 750, and 1000GB.

I'm struggling to keep 10% free space on my 120GB Kingston HyperX even though it's OS/applications only. Looks like a 250GB 840 EVO might be in my future.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2013 22:16

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

I have a Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB that's been great for a year and a half, but I have trouble keeping 10% free even though my media is stored on HDDs. With Black Friday approaching, I figured now would be a good time to upgrade the drive, presumably to a Samsung 840 Evo. 240/256GB would probably be sufficient for another 18 months. Does this make sense or should I make the jump to 500/512GB? Budget is a moderate concern.

Josh Lyman fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Nov 13, 2013

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 11:48

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

With all this talk of upgrading my 120GB Kingston HyperX 3k to a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo, I forgot that my roommate has a match 120GB Kingston sitting around that he never installed.

If I buy it from him, should I leave the drives separate or RAID them? I realize there probably won't be a performance gain, but I'm concerned about having to manage the 10% free space on two drives.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 06:39

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

RoadCrewWorker posted:

Obviously, that's why you only write on the disk once and then set it to read-only mode.

Library of Congress should do this with all their archives so that we can access everything super fast on our Google machines.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 22:49

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

89 posted:

I have a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Looking at some Black Friday deals to add a second SSD for games and random projects like video editing. Any recommendations? Looking for at least a 256GB upgrade.

The 240GB Intel 530 was on sale for $150 yesterday and today on Amazon Lightning Deals

# ¿ Nov 26, 2013 02:30

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

I know there's a SSD deals thread, but this is too hot for just one thread. Ebay super power seller with 99.8% feedback is selling 500GB 840 Evo for $280 w/free shipping from New Jersey: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung-840-EVO-Series-500GB-2-5-SATA-III-Internal-Solid-State-Drive-/370952089434

# ¿ Nov 28, 2013 08:00

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Stanley Pain posted:

I think the 120GB models had some issues with them, and all the 3K drives (and a bunch of other Sandforce drives) had firmware issues with BSODing out of sleep state. So that definitely inflated those return numbers.

That being said a difference of 2% or 5% doesn't really mean much, and a difference of 0.6% and 1.0% means even less. My major problem with those numbers is that we know so little about them.

Funny anecdotal story here. I bought 8 3TB Seagate drives (0.95% defect/return rate). Fast forward about 6 months and I had 6 of the drives fail. Bad luck and all that You are however, FAR more likely to run into a "luck of the draw" issue vs. a statistically significant issue based on 0.6% vs 1.0% return rates based off a single retailer.

FWIW, I've been running a 120GB Kingston 3K for about 18 months with zero problems. Checking Crystal Disk Info, it has 698 power ons because I set my computer to sleep when I leave for work during the day and 6320 hours.

Obviously, my anecdote doesn't imply any general trend, but I don't want people to think the drives are trash. That said, I got it because it was $90 after rebate in a time when 120GB Sandforce drives were averaging $140. If I had to pick a drive today, I would only get the Samsung 840 Evo or Intel 530.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 03:36

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

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

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

ufarn posted:

Is there any reason to consider getting an SSD after Christmas? I don't live in the U.S., so I don't expect there to be any special deals.

Some countries will have Boxing Day deals, and the best US deals were all lead up to Black Friday and through Cyber Monday anyway.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2013 23:23

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

DrDork posted:

Mostly so you can put bigger numbers in your sig line on [H] and the like.

Do people still post there? I thought it pretty much died once the off-topic forum split off in 2003 or whenever.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 03:54

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Supradog posted:

The monitor subforum over there is one of the better ones on the internet, but that's the only thing worth visiting for.

I thought overclock.net was the go-to, though I admittedly did use both when I decided buy a 27" Korean 2 years ago.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 11:56

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Alereon posted:

Anandtech has posted a review of the Samsung XP941 OEM M.2 SSD. This drive uses a controller with a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface, allowing up to 2GB/sec of interface bandwidth. Downsides include that it is not bootable on pre-9-series motherboards, Windows disables TRIM on PCIe drives, and that the Samsung SSD Magician software is not supported. This is an OEM-only drive and not available to consumers.

So Windows 8.2 will have to support TRIM as we move toward PCIe drives?

# ¿ May 15, 2014 20:40

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Revol posted:

Isn't SMART mostly crap at predicting SSD failures? Or may it only works on HDDs?

# ¿ Jul 26, 2014 03:38

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

Sir Unimaginative posted:

Most consumer-facing tech sites are poo poo at recommending parts, partly because tech review is cabalistic both with respect to each other (blogging attracts the petty) and with respect to manufacturers (say nice things or you don't get any more free stuff) and partly because no one spends enough time with stuff to give it a proper review because they have to beat (or at least keep pace with) the other reviews.

Unfortunately for many, The Wirecutter is the end all be all of review sites. They do better than most, but no review site can replace something like SH/SC.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 06:09

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

HalloKitty posted:

What the gently caress is the point? How does this even help AMD? There has to be literally no money to be made on rebranding an OCZ drive nobody wants anyway. They won't be able to mark it up.

Idiots who buy SSDs at Best Buy?

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 17:29

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:14

Josh Lyman: May 24, 2009

deimos posted:

People buy computer parts at best buy?

They sell case fans.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 17:59

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