Windows 7 - ssd reliability?

soulfood · 01-15-2012

hi i am concerned about buying an ssd drive ( OCZ vertex III 120GB for operating system), for my new pc, i've heard that they have quick reads but slow write speeds. and thus are unreliable, am i correct? isn't someone out there fixing these problems?, what should i do? thank you .(please don't email your reply as it is down)

essenbe · 01-15-2012

SSDs are probably more reliable than mechanical hard drives. They are best suited for an OS and programs. As such, you will never notice the 'slow' write speeds. I have 5 of them and am quite happy with them and have had no problems. There have been some issues reported with the Vertex III firmware. I don't know if it has been resolved or not. My best suggestion is go to a place like Newegg and read the user reviews. They are the best judge. I'm not sure where you are, but even if you don't buy at Newegg, it is still a good place to research.

Nemix77 · 01-15-2012

Stick with Intel, Crucial or Samsung.

If you care anything about reliability avoid SandForce (OCZ and others) based SSD's for the moment until LSI cleans up the mess and starts out fresh with in-house produced firmwares.

Intel offers 5 years warranty on most of their retail SSD line and 3 years for Crucial and Samsung.

Samsung seems most reliable and firmware bug free (although latest 830 has a bug but not severe), Intel and Crucial are just about tied for second with Intel offering a longer 5 warranty and Crucial being best value for performance.

essenbe · 01-15-2012

BTW, I think the term 'slow write speed' is simply referring to the fact that write speeds are lower than read speeds. If you would like a comparason. Here is a test of a Western Digital Black 6Gb/s drive WD 1002FAEX and a Crucial 128GB M4 SSD. Compare the Speeds. But, remember that for an OS drive, 4kb read speed and access time is all that really matters for the most part.

Western Digital Sata III

Crucial M4 128GB

Layback Bear · 01-15-2012

I chose a Intel series 510 because I have always got quality with anything Intel. The warranty is great but I don't think I will ever have to use it. Once you use this SSD you won't need charts, you will just think its great. Caution SSD'S are habit forming.

bobkn · 01-15-2012

Quote: Originally Posted by Nemix77

Samsung seems most reliable and firmware bug free (although latest 830 has a bug but not severe), Intel and Crucial are just about tied for second with Intel offering a longer 5 warranty and Crucial being best value for performance.

Ah, Performance. The high benchmark numbers for the latest Sandforce-based SSDs seduce some of us into buying them. (Whether the benchmark differences are relevant for real applications, I don't know.)

I've had no issues with my 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 OS drive so far. (Touch wood.)

(My main complaint with OCZ is that if you want to upgrade the firmware on the OS drive, the non-Windows based updater is for Linux. The update process was a little more educational than I'd planned for, as I'm accustomed to DOS-based utilities.)

One concern with SSDs is that their memory cells can be written a finite number of times. Up-to-date drives do "wear leveling", so the writes are distributed over the whole drive. What the useful life would be for most consumer-grade SSDs, I don't know. "Enterprise class" drives are designed for longer lifetimes, but most home users don't buy them because the drives are expensive. I expect that even consumer SSDs may last longer than traditional hard drives, as the SSDs lack the moving parts that can fail in HDs.

JimLewandowski · 01-15-2012

Coding Horror: The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

In spite of this article, I still bought an SSD. But, I'm waiting for a bit before I install it.

Snippets from the article:

… I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.

You might think after this I'd be swearing off SSDs as unstable, unreliable technology. Particularly since I am the world's foremost expert on backups. Well, you'd be wrong. I just went out and bought myself a hot new OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, the clear winner of the latest generation of SSDs to arrive this year. Storage Review calls it the fastest SATA SSD we've seen.

Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don't even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it'd be like going back to dial-up internet or 13" CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!

essenbe · 01-15-2012

Quote: Originally Posted by bobkn

Quote: Originally Posted by Nemix77

Samsung seems most reliable and firmware bug free (although latest 830 has a bug but not severe), Intel and Crucial are just about tied for second with Intel offering a longer 5 warranty and Crucial being best value for performance.

Ah, Performance. The high benchmark numbers for the latest Sandforce-based SSDs seduce some of us into buying them. (Whether the benchmark differences are relevant for real applications, I don't know.)

I've had no issues with my 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 OS drive so far. (Touch wood.)

(My main complaint with OCZ is that if you want to upgrade the firmware on the OS drive, the non-Windows based updater is for Linux. The update process was a little more educational than I'd planned for, as I'm accustomed to DOS-based utilities.)

One concern with SSDs is that their memory cells can be written a finite number of times. Up-to-date drives do "wear leveling", so the writes are distributed over the whole drive. What the useful life would be for most consumer-grade SSDs, I don't know. "Enterprise class" drives are designed for longer lifetimes, but most home users don't buy them because of the drives are expensive. I expect that even consumer SSDs may last longer than traditional hard drives, as the SSDs lack the moving parts that can fail in HDs.

Quite a long thread, but xtremesystems did a test with several versions of SSDs. They had a program that wrote to them 24 hours a day to see how much they could take. The results were amazing. Read it when you have time. Here is a chart from September. For info purposes 478TiB = 535TB

Nemix77 · 01-15-2012

Thanks essenbe just what I was trying to refer to when saying stick to "Intel, Crucial or Samsung".

Samsung us a bit expensive when when considering only 3 years warranty provided for their SSD lines but the performance, reliability and in-house produced: firmware, memory chips and controller makes Samsung SSD's a top choice by all standards.

essenbe · 01-15-2012

Well, I own 5 SSDs. I don't know much about Samsung except what I've read. Everything I have read gives the 830 serise good reviews. I have Intel, Vertex2 and 3 Crucial M4's. The only thing I say is don't sell Crucial short. Crucial, Intel or the samsung would be a good choice, in my opinion. Maybe I should buy a Samsung just so I can give an opinion on it.

But, I'm pretty partial to the M4, right now.

Windows 7 - ssd reliability?

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