SSD Reliability

[crowdx]

Hi all,
so I am thinking of taking the plunge and buying an SSD drive for my main system. When I look on Newegg etc I am seeing a lot of drive failures. How has people's experience been here? I am thinking of going for a 120 gig and do a full OS install plus WoW on it.
Are SSDs reliable enough to run everything off it?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

No issues here. Running dual Kingston SSDNow V-series (with the Intel-licensed controllers) in RAID-0 on Win7, including my OS. Switched over about, oh, 4 months or so ago.

[Kris1234]

no issues with my intel ssd either. and I must say the experience was like changing from dial-up to dsl

[outdrsyguy1]

my intel's been fine for over a year now. the change was as kris1234 described, like going from dial up to dsl.

[tallone2]

used both intel and ocz (vertex) ssd drives for OS and game drives in my desktop and laptop, i got spoiled with the desktop and had to update the laptop also.

[Fef]

I had a 60GB OCZ Vertex for something like a year and a half. It was first used on my WoW boxing drive with the game and Vista 64 on. Now it is my Mac OS system drive. No issues at all.

I also had a 80GB X25 Intel for some 2 month, it took the place of the Vertex, running WoW under Windows 7. No issues neither.

[Ualaa]

I'm using a Patriot Torq 64GB SSD.
Warcraft is the only thing on the drive.
Have had it for over a year now, under Vista 64-bit (no Trim command), and it hasn't slowed down at all.

Not mind-blowingly faster than my 150GB Raptor entering game, but still faster; once in the game, zoning from spells or boats is virtually instant instead of a 3-4 seconds.

[daanji]

About a year ago I purchased a 120 GB OCZ Vertex Sata II.

In October, the drive completely failed. I RMAed the device with OCZ, but that process took about a month to complete.

Since I wanted to get my system up and running again, I bought 2 Kingston 64GB SSD and put them in RAID0.

This configuration was even faster.

OCZ 120 GB

200 MB / s read and write

Dual Kingston 64 GB in RAID 0

443 MB / s read
367 MB / s writes

The Kingstons were cheaper too! They have worked flawlessly for the last 3 months.


Since then, I received my replacement drive from OCZ, which has worked fine so far.

[crowdx]

Well I took the plunge and bought this drive
http://www.frys.com/product/6475582?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
now the question is whether to install on my desktop or my laptop. My initial idea was my desktop but now I am also thinking of doing a fresh laptop install with it.

[daanji]

Well I took the plunge and bought this drive
http://www.frys.com/product/6475582?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
now the question is whether to install on my desktop or my laptop. My initial idea was my desktop but now I am also thinking of doing a fresh laptop install with it.

Unless you actually need 120GB of space, you could have gone with 2 64GB SSDs for around the same price. That way both would get the benefit :)

[crowdx]

Unless you actually need 120GB of space, you could have gone with 2 64GB SSDs for around the same price. That way both would get the benefit :)

Well my OS and programs currently take about 80gig on each machine, so 64gb would not have been enough. I have to check to see if the laptop has a second sata port, it does have space for 2 drives but not sure about the ports. If it has the port I might buy a smaller drive for it and use a standard drive for storage (HD movies etc when travelling)

[Kromtor]

i had some crash issues with eve after switching to SSD, however, haven't had a single crash with WoW so it's probably not the fault of the drive like I had originally thought.
that being said I'd still recommend the newer kingstons over any others, they are proven reliable

[Noids]

2 x intel x25m 80GB in Raid 0 here and no problems at all. Considering a lot of people are using these in Raid 0 as well as the initial concerns about drive life, their reliability is remarkable. For what its worth I have had to RMA a new 3.5" mechanical drive 1 month after purchase as well as an oem 2.5" notebook mechanical drive, so these sorts of incidents are not specific to SSDs. With new controllers, better DIMMs and software/OS support, SSDs are becoming more reliable all the time and the only reason not to use one in a home system now would be cost IMO (which is also improving).

[Kromtor]

UGH
correction: I'm still crashing with my damn WD SSD's. garbage. fast garbage.

[Sajuuk]

wait, you actually read newegg reviews?

Just do your research ahead of time, find what you want, and get it.

[crowdx]

Well I have been running the kingston 128gig drive over the weekend and it is benchmarking close to what it was advertised as for it's read bench.
Overall I am pretty happy with it although, as others have commented, it is not as fast in real world as I might have expected, i.e. it is very fast but WoW still takes a little while to load, so not anywhere close to instant loads.
Thanks for all the help

[Catamer]

I've had mixed results.
It seems to work great if you have some kind of Raid going, the more the better.
I have a machine with 4 SSD and a caching raid controller and it smokes all of the time.

I also have tried using the same brand of SSD (Intel) on a laptop and a EEE-box and find they have moments where they lock up for a second or two under heavy loads. So for me it seems like if you only have one drive it's not that great and when you have several it smokes.