Post by thread:[OT] Help picking an SSD

Hi all, I'm looking for an SSD for my desktop computer. I hope someone here who has some experience with SSDs can point me to some good products. I bought a 30GB AData SSD about 15 months ago and it failed inexplicably after 6 months of normal use. Will not buy AData again; I knew what I was getting into, but took the risk anyway. Requirements: - Decent quality from a respectable brand. I don't want it failing on me a few months down the line. - Reasonable price. Doesn't have to be the cheapest, but I'm a student, so I'd rather not empty my bank account. - Size: at least ~60GB, 128GB would be good too. - Has some kind of a warranty (~1 to 3 years?) so if it fails under normal use, I can get it replaced without jumping through hoops. - Must be SATA 3 (unless someone can tell me why SATA 2 is good enough, but modern SSDs have higher than 3Gbps performance and SATA 3 offers 6Gbps). -- Note: I'm looking to buy a PCI-E 2 (or 3) SATA 3 4-port hardware RAID controller and another SSD of similar size a few months after I buy this one so I can stick them in a RAID 0 configuration

Here you go: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-review-benchmark,3139-6.html A thought on SATA3 vs 2…even with a hardware controller, your machine may not be able to effectively make use of the increased throughput. You may spend a bunch of extra money and not see a significant improvement in load times, etc. If you do buy a controller card I suggest a card by 3Ware. When SSD drives fail they tend to fail catastrophically and without warning.. Make sure you have things backed up. I recommend CrashPlan. -Pete On Jun 5, 2012, at 10:39 AM, V G wrote: {Quote hidden}> Hi all, > > I'm looking for an SSD for my desktop computer. I hope someone here who has > some experience with SSDs can point me to some good products. I bought a > 30GB AData SSD about 15 months ago and it failed inexplicably after 6 > months of normal use. Will not buy AData again; I knew what I was getting > into, but took the risk anyway. > > Requirements: > > - Decent quality from a respectable brand. I don't want it failing on me a > few months down the line. > - Reasonable price. Doesn't have to be the cheapest, but I'm a student, so > I'd rather not empty my bank account. > - Size: at least ~60GB, 128GB would be good too. > - Has some kind of a warranty (~1 to 3 years?) so if it fails under normal > use, I can get it replaced without jumping through hoops. > - Must be SATA 3 (unless someone can tell me why SATA 2 is good enough, but > modern SSDs have higher than 3Gbps performance and SATA 3 offers 6Gbps). > -- Note: I'm looking to buy a PCI-E 2 (or 3) SATA 3 4-port hardware RAID > controller and another SSD of similar size a few months after I buy this > one so I can stick them in a RAID 0 configuration. > -

On 06/06/2012 18:27, Peter Loron wrote: > > When SSD drives fail they tend to fail catastrophically and without warning. Make sure you have things backed up. I recommend CrashPlan. Having had two fail now I thoroughly recommend you only store your OS and not useful data on the SSD. First went after a year, its replacement after only 2 months. Seems to be an issue when the PC wakes from sleep and the drive goes into a panic mode. Davi

I ended up buying two OCZ Vertex 4 128GB drives and put them in RAID 0 via the motherboard's "fake" RAID. The Intel P67 RAID controller on my motherboard seems to be surprisingly good and well supported. The Windows 7 installer detected it without even having to install the drivers (but I did anyway). The drives work very well and I'm very pleased with the performance. I don't think I'll need to get a dedicated RAID card soon. I always do incremental partition backups to a separate hard drive every two days, so even if something fails, it doesn't take long to restore to another drive or partition and keep working until a replacement drive is installed. @Peter, SATA 3 makes a huge difference, especially on my system. I can do greater than 1GB/s reads and writes (benchmarks) to my RAID 0 array at the moment. @David, I store everything on these SSDs and make backups every two days to other drives. There's no point using SSDs if you're not actually going to use them

faster better cheaper pick any 2 SSD means faster is already chosen for you. faster and cheaper get an OCZ, with the latest firmware they seem to have stopped blue screening and general flakyness at least. faster and better, get an intel, they have about the same failure rate as regular rotating media it seems don't RAID your SSD's, TRIM commands won't go through the raid controller so it'll start to suck loads for writes pretty quickly On 06/06/12 03:39, V G wrote: {Quote hidden}> Hi all, > > I'm looking for an SSD for my desktop computer. I hope someone here who has > some experience with SSDs can point me to some good products. I bought a > 30GB AData SSD about 15 months ago and it failed inexplicably after 6 > months of normal use. Will not buy AData again; I knew what I was getting > into, but took the risk anyway. > > Requirements: > > - Decent quality from a respectable brand. I don't want it failing on me a > few months down the line. > - Reasonable price. Doesn't have to be the cheapest, but I'm a student, so > I'd rather not empty my bank account. > - Size: at least ~60GB, 128GB would be good too. > - Has some kind of a warranty (~1 to 3 years?) so if it fails under normal > use, I can get it replaced without jumping through hoops. > - Must be SATA 3 (unless someone can tell me why SATA 2 is good enough, but > modern SSDs have higher than 3Gbps performance and SATA 3 offers 6Gbps). > -- Note: I'm looking to buy a PCI-E 2 (or 3) SATA 3 4-port hardware RAID > controller and another SSD of similar size a few months after I buy this > one so I can stick them in a RAID 0 configuration.

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 3:00 AM, Jake Anderson <spam_OUTjakeTakeThisOuTvapourforge.com> wrote: > don't RAID your SSD's, TRIM commands won't go through the raid > controller so it'll start to suck loads for writes pretty quickly > Yup, I'm aware of that, but: 1. Intel's motherboard RAID driver (alpha version at the moment) does support TRIM over RAID 0. I'll just update when it becomes stable. 2. The background garbage collection in modern SSDs (especially the Vertex 4) is supposedly really good and will do its thing when you just leave your computer idle for a bit. Since I leave it on 24/7, it gets all the time it needs when I'm sleeping. I'm not worried about it at all. The benchmarks show that in RAID 0 mode, the read and write speeds are almost 1GB (GigaBYTE) per second, almost twice the speed of a single SSD without RAID 0. Even if it does somehow start losing its write performance, it would take about half an hour for me to do a backup, full erase, and full restore, so I don't really have anything to lose