My love/hate relationship with SSDs

[Multibocks]

So I've about had it with SSDs. Yes they are fast, but it comes with a price: reliability. Of the 5 SSDs I have had all 5 have failed at some point in their life. These are not cheap walmart brands either. I've owned some of the fastest SSDs ever made and now I'm this ----> <---- close to ripping out the two I have and going back to disks. I bought the new agility 3s from OCZ when they first came out in March and they worked fine until recently.

The best part is what manufacturers want you to do to possibly make them work again. Let's just say their procedures are not user friendly, at all.

Is their any advancement in HDDs that would be useful to boxers? I'd rather have a semi-fast HDD than a completely unreliable SSD.


Oh and if anyone asks, my vacation from boxing didn't last long.

[MiRai]

So I've about had it with SSDs. Yes they are fast, but it comes with a price: reliability. Of the 5 SSDs I have had all 5 have failed at some point in their life. These are not cheap walmart brands either. I've owned some of the fastest SSDs ever made and now I'm this ----> <---- close to ripping out the two I have and going back to disks. I bought the new agility 3s from OCZ when they first came out in March and they worked fine until recently.

The best part is what manufacturers want you to do to possibly make them work again. Let's just say their procedures are not user friendly, at all.
Have you been to the OCZ forums? All it is is one big forum of people with tons of problems and issues. Their
forums are full of stickies and announcements and it's confusing labyrinth of hoops to jump through in order to
troubleshoot things. I am speaking from my experience over there a few months ago, though.

Their Sandforce controller is crap and last I heard they were blaming Intel chipsets because of it. It's
unfortunate that you've had such bad luck with them but, you couldn't give me a brand new OCZ drive for free
because I would be hesitant to put any data on it I didn't want to lose. Maybe I'd use it as a FRAPS drive.

As a side note, I'm a happy Intel customer.


Is their any advancement in HDDs that would be useful to boxers? I'd rather have a semi-fast HDD than a completely unreliable SSD.
Probably some WD Raptors in a raid setup would give some nice performance.



Oh and if anyone asks, my vacation from boxing didn't last long.
The dark side beckons...

[Multibocks]

Yeah did the Raptor route on my old computer... God are those slow :(


Maybe I will buy an intel and check it out. Are their installs as crazy as OCZs?

[Multibocks]

I did own an ioExtreme, but I gave that shit away because it crashed a lot.


Does Intel make a PCI-e solution that is extremely fast like revodrives?

[MiRai]

Yeah did the Raptor route on my old computer... God are those slow :(


Maybe I will buy an intel and check it out. Are their installs as crazy as OCZs?
I hooked both of my Intel 510's up right out of the box and they just worked. I was an SSD virgin prior to these
and had no idea what to expect. After that I grabbed the SSD Toolbox from their site and ran it. Absolutely zero
hassle. You can watch the nifty video below so you know what to expect with installation.

F8owkFF-AZ0




Does Intel make a PCI-e solution that is extremely fast like revodrives?
Soon. And they're supposed to support TRIM as well.

[Esca]

Have you guys had any experience with Crucial m4 drives? I'm actually about to place an order for s system that uses them.

[Multibocks]

Oh good. I will keep limping along until the PCI products launch.

[MiRai]

Have you guys had any experience with Crucial m4 drives? I'm actually about to place an order for s system that uses them.
Not personally but Anandtech just did a review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4712/the-crucial-m4-ssd-update-faster-with-fw0009) on that drive with the new firmware that Crucial just released
and apparently it's much better than it was before.


Oh good. I will keep limping along until the PCI products launch.
Supposedly, Q4 '11 (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4452/intel-710-and-720-ssd-specifications).

[Multibocks]

Looks like it might be spendy, but 2200 MB/s is just :eek:


I must have it! Any guess on price?

[Vecter]

Sandforce drives are faster performance wise than Intel's but what holds them back as MiRai stated is reliability with their controller. This is why Anandtech will state that for reliability choose the Intel 510. I have had my Intel 160 GB G2 for quite some time and have my WoW running on it for 5 boxing. Zero issues to report.

[MiRai]

Looks like it might be spendy, but 2200 MB/s is just :eek:


I must have it! Any guess on price?
Uhhhh... if I had to guess... the 200GB model will probably run somewhere between $600 - $1000. From
looking at what's on the market right now and knowing that people trust Intel's current reliability on SSDs...
that would be my guess. I may pick one up if they're more on the $600 side of the spectrum but I'd rather
save for a nice dual CPU Ivy Bridge setup. :)

[Multibocks]

Sweet that is totally in my price range. Initially I did have 2 510s, but a review showed vertex 3 was faster. Wish I never saw that review :mad:

[daanji]

I owned a 128 GB OC Vertex drive. It was great until it died after 3 months. I couldn't fix it, so I got a replacement via manufacturer's warranty. Since the process takes a month, I opted to buy 2x Kingston 64 GB drives and put them in RAID 0 setup.

The OCZ drive gave me 220 MB/s read and writes.
The 2x Kingston 64 GB in RAID 0 gave me 450 MB/s and have been rock solid for 6 months, no slow down. They were cheaper too.

[Bollwerk]

Fwiw, I have had an OCZ Vertex 2 boot drive and Crucial C300 for wow for at least 8 months now and had zero problems.

[Tonuss]

I'm running a C300 for a few months without issues as well. If I'd seen a thread like this before I bought it, I probably wouldn't have. :o Then again, that's life on the leading edge!

[Multibocks]

So my Vertex 3 running my OS is very close to failing. Is it possible to drop a 510 in and copy over OS and then remove that shit excuse for a SSD?

[MiRai]

So my Vertex 3 running my OS is very close to failing. Is it possible to drop a 510 in and copy over OS and then remove that shit excuse for a SSD?
If anything is corrupted on the Vertex 3 you're just going to be copying over the corruption. I would do a fresh
install on the 510.

[Multibocks]

Sigh you are right, but I really don't want to do all the work of finding all the drivers :(

[pinotnoir]

So my Vertex 3 running my OS is very close to failing. Is it possible to drop a 510 in and copy over OS and then remove that shit excuse for a SSD?

How do you know the Vertex 3 is close to failing?

[Multibocks]

Fails to start up and sometimes it takes multiple restarts and a windows repair.

[d0z3rr]

Check out the Seagate Cheetah's:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148538

15k rpm with a 2ms latency which is quite good. I've never been a fan of seagate, but worth a try.

Alternatively you can try the new WD VelociRaptors (10k rpm), which are much improved over the old Raptor's from back in the day (which were, at their time, extremely fast).

[Tonuss]

The Seagate is an SAS drive and the connector doesn't look like standard SATA. I'm curious if there are adapters and if the drives are good for standard usage as opposed to storage arrays.

[d0z3rr]

Yup, there are PCIe controllers. I wouldn't have a clue as to which ones are quality and which are not.

They would be perfectly fine for normal usage. Keep in mind they are made for SANs that have massively active databases (reading/writing) and whatnot. They wouldn't even break a sweat with a normal user. Though I question the person that purchases an SAS drive and uses it for simple file storage...best used for OS drive/games.

[Multibocks]

OCZ drive almost died today. It took multiple restarts and some BIOS changes to get computer running. I don't know if Intel is doing a job on them (they hint this on their forums), but man am I sick of their shit.