SSD Reliability

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Tzupy
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Post by Tzupy » Sun Sep 26, 2010 12:07 pm

Is there any competent update on the C300 reliability / TRIM efficacy? I haven't found anything recent.
In the Crucial forums people recently complained about massive write performance drops, from 200MB/s to 65MB/s in just one month of ownership.
FWIW, my Intel G2 160 gives me a few minor hiccups if I forget to manually trim it (I'm running Vista64) for more than 2 weeks.

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Post by ascl » Sun Sep 26, 2010 12:36 pm

dhanson865 wrote:He said repeatedly they would rather deploy drives as is out of the box than to tweak the OS, over provision the drive, or mess with firmware updates.

Hearing that makes me glad I don't work for Intel.
I actually see this as a good thing (well, as a customer anyway), as it means they expect their drives to "just work", and not require a bunch of fiddling to avoid problems. I really expect to be able to put my computer to sleep without causing problems, for example.

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Post by dhanson865 » Sun Sep 26, 2010 1:46 pm

ascl wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:He said repeatedly they would rather deploy drives as is out of the box than to tweak the OS, over provision the drive, or mess with firmware updates.

Hearing that makes me glad I don't work for Intel.
I actually see this as a good thing (well, as a customer anyway), as it means they expect their drives to "just work", and not require a bunch of fiddling to avoid problems. I really expect to be able to put my computer to sleep without causing problems, for example.
Agreed from your standpoint. It's just that I've worked IT and his comments (those I mentioned plus a little bit more) make it sound like the lower level techs are either severely overworked to keep costs down or are under strict orders and have to apologize to their end users instead of being proactive and preventing some issues.

They did say they stopped installing 80GB and standardized on the 160GB models which is a plus. It also would have been a great time to over provision as someone going from a 80GB to 145GB drive wouldn't be complaining about it not being 160GB.

fwiw they also use Whole Disk Encryption and WDE slows down the PC somewhat. WDE and failure rates were the driving forces to move away from traditional hard drives. Because the WDE randomizes all writes, traditional hard drives are at a severe disavantage. Ironically WDE makes Sandforce drives not a good choice for Intel even if they didn't make a competing product.

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Post by dhanson865 » Sun Sep 26, 2010 3:20 pm

Tzupy wrote:Is there any competent update on the C300 reliability / TRIM efficacy? I haven't found anything recent.
In the Crucial forums people recently complained about massive write performance drops, from 200MB/s to 65MB/s in just one month of ownership.
FWIW, my Intel G2 160 gives me a few minor hiccups if I forget to manually trim it (I'm running Vista64) for more than 2 weeks.
C300 reviews on newegg have been glowing since the last firmware update though we all have to admit that reviews have been edited on newegg in the past for other companies so they can't be taken as irrefutable evidence.

I looked at the crucial forums and wasn't impressed by what I saw there. Looks messy, lots of blind leading the blind.

The garbage collection on the C300 isn't robust so you have to avoid getting the drive into a slowdown to begin with.

If I had to guess I'd say the C300 users are suffering from drives without enough over provisioning. If I buy a 64GB C300 I won't partition it above 50GB (128GB becomes 100GB, 256GB becomes 200GB). Presumably the firmware will take advantage of the extra space in the wear leveling process but only if you don't make the mistake of formatting it to full capacity first.

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Post by frenchie » Mon Sep 27, 2010 1:07 pm

Little update : my 80GB G2 Intel SSD has now 4818 power on hours and 2.11 TB host writes. Still really fast and very responsive. An amazing buy.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by ilovejedd » Mon Oct 18, 2010 7:28 am

I'll be buying an SSD soon and I'm just wondering, with these modern SSDs, is it still recommended not to format them to capacity? I anticipate 120GB drives to drop down to less than $200 and figured it would be a much better fit for me than an OS-only 40GB SSD. Should I keep some scratch space or can I just format to the full 120GB (well, probably ~110GB actual)?

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:26 pm

ilovejedd wrote:I'll be buying an SSD soon and I'm just wondering, with these modern SSDs, is it still recommended not to format them to capacity? I anticipate 120GB drives to drop down to less than $200 and figured it would be a much better fit for me than an OS-only 40GB SSD. Should I keep some scratch space or can I just format to the full 120GB (well, probably ~110GB actual)?
Yes, you still want to format it at 80% capacity if you want as much space as possible without the possible downsides long term.

Formatting it for less than 80% is an option if you want to format it to 50% or some other round number less than 80% just to save grabbing a calculator or have a lucky number or something but you won't gain much in longevity or performance by reducing the size below 80%.

For a 120GB drive that would be 96GB, 95GB, or 90GB depending on your preference for powers of 2, multiples of 5, or multiples of 10 (100GB is 83.33% which is close enough if you just want to see triple digits).

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Mon Nov 15, 2010 10:29 pm

So dhanson865, how are the reliability specs looking as of late? Crucial C300 and other items of interest. :mrgreen:

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 8:11 am

oofta, It's been a while since I've done a proper data dive on this.

New players since June are

Samsung 470
Intel Gen 2 120GB
Indilinx Martini (looking for lots of new models as they replace the Indilinx barefoot drives)
A large variety of sandforce drives (seems like a new model every two weeks)


I'll do some new drive searches now and try for a full update later.

Intel Gen 2 is still the drive to beat reliability wise.

160GB 7/177 failures ~4% (I did weed out 3 posts that were from people that weren't actually reviewing the drive)
120GB 0/000 no reviews yet
80 6/347 ~2%
40 0/008 ~0%
---------
13/532 ~2.4%

Samsung 470
0/30 failures ~0% still too new to tell but no news is good news on this front

Samsung drives were very reliable the last time around (when they were too slow to recommend) It's nice to see that they are fast enough to recommend now and people aren't screaming about them.

Indilinx Martini

OCZ Vertex Plus 0/000 no reviews yet

Sandforce
uggh, this one will be a beast to update, not only are there dozens of models/capacity combinations there are numerous problems with compatibility and performance so there will be tons of negative reviews to sort through. Searching for "sandforce" on newegg shows 28 drifves from

G.SKILL50008476 (9)
Corsair50001459 (6)
A-DATA50002135 (4)
OCZ Technology50001550 (4)
Patriot Memory50002204 (3)
Mushkin Enhanced50001504 (2)

Those are just the ones that have the word sandforce in the searchable description. I'll likely have to fish out dozens more one drive at a time to figure out which controller each uses. I think that one will get it's own post if I ever do it.

For convenience sake lets just pick on OCZ and Corsair for a minute to get a feel for the trend:

OCZ Vertex 2 Pro OCZSSD2-2VTXP100G 0/2 failures. Both reviews are negative as all get out but neither user had a drive fail.

All the other Vertex 2 drives that I know have sandforce controllers didn't show in that search so I'll come back to OCZ in the sandforce specific post.

Corsair Force series
240 1/003
160 0/003
120 10/038
80 0/004
60 11/040
40 2/014
---------
24/102 ~24%

Now the vast majority of these are random BSOD or random reboots, the data is still on the drive and it could be used on some systems but the since this is a reliability thread I can't state clearly enough that these drives are NOT reliable.

That is your comparison, 2% of Intel drives give users problems, 20+% of corsair sandforce users are having problems.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 8:55 am

OK, lets look at OCZ "Vertex 2" sandforce (I'm still not ready to try and wrap all the sandforce into one list)

In order of most reviews (ignoring the indilinx based Vertex and the Vertex Turbo, including the Vertex 2 LE and Vertex 2 Pro) we have these Vertex 2 drives (and I still haven't searched for Agility 2 or Onyx 2 drives that are also sandforce based).

60GB 16/108 failures including one that caught on fire
120GB 9/089 several mentions of high pitched squeals from non failed drives
50GB 10/059
100GB 2/027
120GB ?/027
240GB 11/026
40GB ?/020
90GB ?/011
90GB ?/006
120GB ?/004
180GB ?/003
180GB ?/003
200GB ?/003
240GB ?/002
60GB 0/000 No reviews yet
50GB 0/000 No reviews yet
200GB 0/000 No reviews yet
50GB ?/036
100GB ?/002
480GB 0/000 No reviews yet
360GB 0/000 No reviews yet
400GB 0/000 No reviews yet
240GB 0/000 No reviews yet
400GB 0/000 No reviews yet
480GB 0/000 No reviews yet

That is a lot of work, Short answer from the first 4 drives on the list is 37/283 ~13% which is better than the Corsair ~24% but still far worse than the Intel ~2%. Adding in the 240GB version with 26 reviews makes it 48/309 ~15%.

I'm just not in the mood to sort through that many complaints right now.

And lets be clear I didn't count any complaint as a failed drive. Only showstoppers made the count. Low write speeds on a SSD are user error or poor controller design in my books, doesn't count as a failed drive. Didn't match your favorite benchmark, lower IOPS than expected, doesn't count.

DOA counted, died after x hours, days, weeks, months counts, BSOD counts the vast majority of the time (depends on the tone of the review some just want to jump on the bandwagon and don't own a drive so you have to exclude them). The drive sporting bad sectors then showing up as a 8MB or 8GB drive after a reboot counts.
Last edited by dhanson865 on Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:29 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:16 am

That is your comparison, 2% of Intel drives give users problems, 20+% of corsair sandforce users are having problems.
Almost sold, do you think the AHCI change may have something to do with this? Perhaps one company informs the user better than the other companies?

Seems a shame to banish Corsair so harshly most on 1 particular model.

A

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 11:10 am

No, I think the AHCI issue is almost a non issue no matter what drive you look at. If you have AHCI/IDE issues it usually only affects speed not reliability. It's easily changed but some board/drive combinations will perform better with AHCI and some will perform better with IDE. So long as you test it both ways and find which one works for you I don't consider that an issue worth worrying about before you purchase. You could go to vendor specific forums and check to see if anyone has your motherboard and the drive you are considering but worst case if you hit a compatibility issue is you return the drive and buy a drive based on a different controller. Compatibility issues are more common with the C300 (Micron/Crucial) and Sandforce drives. Samsung 470 and Intel Gen 2 should both be pretty safe bets regarding compatibility.

The sandforce drives have an issue with firmware especially when it comes to handling idle power down situations (OS on but drive powered down, S1 suspend for the whole system, S3 suspend for the whole system). They also seem to get into bad spots at random, random enough that it rarely happens when the drive is busy.

Sandforce drives also are misleading, not to the point of false advertising, but they don't hold up to advertised specs in many workloads. Even if they were absolutely reliable I wouldn't give them the nod over Intel on performance just because performance varies so much with sandforce drives.

As to the one model comment I'm assuming you posted that before I posted the OCZ stats or did you miss the Corsair Force stats in the previous post? Either way that's two different companies selling sandforce based drives both having failure rates in the double digits percentage wise.


48/309 OCZ Sandforce
24/102 Corsair sandforce
------
72/411 ~17.5% failure rate just in the short sample

It might be worse or better than that if I go through and add the Agility 2, Onyx 2, G.SKILL, A-DATA, Patriot, Mushkin drives but I'd expect it to stay in the range that would make me want to avoid it.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 11:32 am

As to the one model comment I'm assuming you posted that before I posted the OCZ stats or did you miss the Corsair Force stats in the previous post? Either way that's two different companies selling sandforce based drives both having failure rates in the double digits percentage wise.
I did not miss, I was simply looking for user caused issues. It's a shame in any case, certainly not worth the slightly lower price or the questionable speed increases.

Your assistance is much appreciated.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:07 pm

Still chugging through, just finished checking Micron/Crucial/Marvell C300

128GB 5/093
256GB 6/078
64GB 0/045
128GB 0/014
64GB 0/013
64GB 1/010 (also micro SATA complaints)
128GB 0/006 (also micro SATA complaints)
256GB 0/006
256GB 0/001
------------
12/266 ~4.5%

Not as low as Intel but well low enough that I feel safe recommending it.
Last edited by dhanson865 on Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:22 pm

In another thread I made this list of controllers, let me try adding reliability data to them. The sort order on the list is in preference by speed, reliability, and compatibility not necessarily in that order, just my gut sort of those factors.

Tier 1
Intel Gen 2 (~2% failures, handles XP and Vista better than most, Intel SSD Toolbox v2.x could put this drive at the top of the list even if reliability or speed wasn't a factor.)
Marvell (C300) (~4% failures but a faster drive in most cases, I'd buy on price between this and the Intel Gen 2 drives. If I used Win 7 or had a SATA 6GB/s controller I might favor it slightly)

Tier 2 or Tier 1?
Samsung 470** (unknown, too new to tell but likely less reliable than Intel by a hair and similar in speed, waiting for reviews)
Indilinx Martini (unknown, too new to tell but likely less reliable than Intel and similar in speed, sometimes faster sometimes slower)

Tier 2
Sandforce* (~15% failure rates, higher with some brands, some compatibility issues)
Indilinx Barefoot (~10-50% failure rates depending on the brand, the more reliable brands are worth buying but only if they are noticeably cheaper than the Intel Gen 2 drives)
Toshiba/Jmicron (more than 16MB cache) (~5% failure rates, slower than Intel, slower than C300, Slower than Sandforce, more prone to stutter than any drive above it in the list).

Obsolete
Intel Gen 1 (no TRIM support, slower than Gen 2 drives, discontinued)
old Jmicron (less than 1MB cache (not a typo, the old drives had KB of cache), slower than any SSD above it in the list)
old Samsung (slower than any SSD above it in the list)

* Sandforce drives would be 3rd place on that list if the failure rate was under 10%

** Samsung 470 drives could be in 3rd, 4th, 5th place, I'm waiting for Anandtech to review the drive and for reliability data to show up to be sure where to place this.

Not mentioned above is Indilinx has provided support tools for their drives allowing XP/Vista users to have an alternative to Intel Gen 2 drives. They aren't cheap enough for that to be a big factor right now but It's worth keeping an eye on the Martini revision in case it becomes competitive.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4020/ocz- ... -martini/2 to backup the performance I think the random data write speed is a decent proxy for overall performance. comparisons such as

Code: Select all

         Sandforce 40GB 70.9
              C300 64GB 68.3
Indilinx Martini  128GB 47.6
         Intel G2  40GB 37.7
Indilinx Barefoot 128GB 14.4
It's not a perfect representation of the overall performance order but I think its close and compared to my list shows how much sandforce is being hurt by their reliability/compatibility issues right now.

Marvell C300 is being held back by the vast number of Windows XP/Vista users that aren't migrating to Windows 7. The C300 is a nice controller (or at leas looks nice because they are so generous with the Cache on the board) but doesn't hold up as well in non TRIM situations.
Last edited by dhanson865 on Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:33 pm

uggh, here is an attempt to examine modern jmicron/toshiba reliability
anandtech wrote:The SSDNow V 100 is an update to the SSDNow V Series drives, both of which use the JMicron JMF618 controller. Don't get this confused with the 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive which actually uses a Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller, also used in the SSDNow V+. Confused yet? It gets better.

The standard V+ is gone and replaced by the new V+ 100, which is what we're here to take a look at today. This drive uses the T6UG1XBG controller but with updated firmware.
All that confusion really means is that you have 3 controller/firmware revisions that are very very similar some have the JMicron name on the chip some have the JMicron name scraped off and Toshiba painted or etched on over the old name, some have the Toshiba name at the original point of manufacture.

What is in a name? That which we call a JMicron
By any other name would run as slow.

anyway back to newegg diving.

Kingston SSDNow V+/V+100 1/84 failure either Kingston is scrubbing their reviews or its just too early to tell.
Kingston SSDNow V/V100 22/434 ~5% failure rate, much more believable.

ahh yes Western Digital has a JM618 based drive, lets look at it.

WD SiliconEdge Blue 64/128GB ~5% failure rate.

OK so in general the JMicron/Toshiba drives seem as reliable as a C300 but is slightly slower than a Indlinx Barefoot, definitely slower than Intel, C300, sandforce, Samsung 470.
Last edited by dhanson865 on Fri Dec 24, 2010 12:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:59 pm

I have the JMicron on the same list as the Rambler and the Dodge Omni.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Tue Nov 23, 2010 8:36 am

Sandforce recap

ADATA S599 (sandforce controller)

6/56 failures ~11% though that drive hasn't sold much compared to many of the others I've dived for.

Interesting to note ADATA advertises these mostly by chips present no usable capacity. For example Most sandforce drives with 64GB flash will label the drive as 60GB, ADATA labels it 64GB. Note this is not the usual 1000 vs 1024 or unformatted vs formatted issue, this is on top of those concepts. ADATA S599 uses 13% overprovisioning but unlike other companies they don't round down the product name to a multiple of 10 to offset the overprovisioning.


Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe (sandforce controller)

9/83 failures ~11% again not a lot of reviews.



G.SKILL Phoenix/Phoenix Pro (sandforce controller)

23/198 failures ~12%


all together we had

48/309 OCZ Sandforce ~15.5%
23/198 G.Skill sandforce ~12%
24/102 Corsair sandforce ~23.5%
9/83 Mushkin sandforce ~11%
6/56 Adata sandforce ~11%
--------------------------
110/748 failures ~15%

That is your bottom line Sandforce drives have about a 15% failure rate from what I can see on newegg which is significantly out of whack with the 2% and 4% we see with Intel and Marvell controllers.

patriots sandforce drives have less than 10 reviews on newegg so I didn't bother to include them.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Tue Nov 23, 2010 5:40 pm

Important reminder about the percentage of failures. I think it's good for comparison purposes, then again we have no other info at this time. What we need to keep in mind is not everyone who buys a drive reviews it. I speculate that the people who are burned and those who are overwhelmed with the speed are more likely to review than those that are just satisfied. Given that I think all percentages would drop by a fairly equal amount. Those with 20% failure rates may actually be 5%, and those with 2% failure rates may actually be .5%. It's also important to note that when selling tens of thousands of anything even a 2% failure rate is a lot of failures.

Why did I post this? I don't have the foggiest idea.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by Eunos » Tue Nov 23, 2010 5:51 pm

That is not a major factor if the data is being used for comparative purposes on a level playing field. The only other factor I can think of is brand loyalty; for example if an Intel fanboi refused to write a negative review after receiving a DOA drive, whereas there is less likely to be brand loyalty with Sandforce. When all is said and done, I think dhanson's research in this area is the best that I've seen.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:09 pm

When all is said and done, I think dhanson's research in this area is the best that I've seen.
Totally agree.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 7:35 am

aristide1 wrote:Important reminder about the percentage of failures. I think it's good for comparison purposes, then again we have no other info at this time. What we need to keep in mind is not everyone who buys a drive reviews it. I speculate that the people who are burned and those who are overwhelmed with the speed are more likely to review than those that are just satisfied. Given that I think all percentages would drop by a fairly equal amount. Those with 20% failure rates may actually be 5%, and those with 2% failure rates may actually be .5%. It's also important to note that when selling tens of thousands of anything even a 2% failure rate is a lot of failures.

Why did I post this? I don't have the foggiest idea.
actually your 2% .5% example is pretty close to spot on

The newegg data says Intel SSDs fail in the low single digits as a percentage of reviews. IDF quote below says:
Scott Doyle wrote:So with regard to the, the catastrophic failures, The data that we have today with, within Intel within the drives that we have within the field, the field failure rate is coming in below 1% AFR and that's combined with everything. It's really sitting somewhere around, between 0.5% to 0.7% AFR
Scott is a SR. Technical Account Manager at Intel.

So if newegg says 2.4% and Intel says 0.6% say then the failure rate reported is 4x higher than actual. But assuming it's representative then you could normalize it by cutting the percentages to one quarter or you could just use them as a rating and not fixate on the number, realize that better is better no matter the score.

I won't bet my life on the ratio of failed drives between Intel Gen 2 and sandforce 1xxx controllers but I'm happy enough with the data to let it affect a purchase decision.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 8:22 am

I cross posted some of this threads content on storage review and in the process though about a controller I had left out. I'm going to have to change the Tiers again.

Tier 1
Intel Gen 2 (~2% failures, handles XP and Vista better than most, Intel SSD Toolbox v2.x could put this drive at the top of the list even if reliability or speed wasn't a factor.)
Marvell (C300) (~4% failures but a faster drive in most cases, I'd buy on price between this and the Intel Gen 2 drives. If I used Win 7 or had a SATA 6GB/s controller I might favor it slightly)


Tier 2 or Tier 1?
Samsung 470** (unknown, too new to tell but likely less reliable than Intel by a hair and similar in speed, waiting for reviews)
Indilinx Martini (unknown, too new to tell but likely less reliable than Intel Gen2 and similar in speed, sometimes faster sometimes slower)


Tier 2
Sandforce 1xxx* (~15% failure rates, higher with some brands, some compatibility issues)


Tier 3
Indilinx Barefoot (~10-50% failure rates depending on the brand, less reliable than sandforce drives, but there are tools for XP/Vista). This was in Tier 2 but I'm dropping in now that the Martini revision is coming out.
Toshiba/Jmicron (more than 16MB cache) (~5% failure rates, slower than Intel, slower than C300, Slower than Sandforce.


Obsolete
Indilinx Amigos Slower than Indilinx Barefoot but similar in design. ~10% failure rates if you ignore the recalled OCZ Onyx drives.
Intel Gen 1 (no TRIM support, slower than Gen 2 drives, discontinued)
old Jmicron (less than 1MB cache (not a typo, the old drives had KB of cache), slower than any SSD above it in the list)
old Samsung (slower than any SSD above it in the list)

* Sandforce drives would be 3rd place on that list if the failure rate was noticeably under 10%, even higher if they could be under 5% failures with no compatibility issues.

** Samsung 470 drives could be in 3rd, 4th, 5th place, I'm waiting for Anandtech to review the drive and for reliability data to show up to be sure where to place this.

Not mentioned above is Indilinx has provided support tools for their drives allowing XP/Vista users to have an alternative to Intel Gen 2 drives. They aren't cheap enough for that to be a big factor right now but It's worth keeping an eye on the Martini revision in case it becomes competitive.
Last edited by dhanson865 on Wed Nov 24, 2010 10:25 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 8:41 am

OCZ Onyx (Indilinx Amigos)
4/40 ~10%

Looks like they scrubbed the reviews from the failed launch. It also looks like these are still on the market even though the Onyx 2 is out.

I can't think of any Indilinx Amigos drives to add to this post. I guess this controller never saw much sales.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by ilovejedd » Wed Nov 24, 2010 10:18 am

dhanson865 wrote:Looks like they scrubbed the reviews from the failed launch. It also looks like these are still on the market even though the Onyx 2 is out.
You can order an Onyx 2 but I highly doubt you'll be getting them soon. I pre-ordered mine almost as soon as they became available on Amazon and ETA is after Christmas. Another thing, only 120GB and 240GB capacities were announced for the Onyx 2. It's possible OCZ may keep the Indilinx controllers for lower capacity offerings for a while.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by NTNgod » Wed Nov 24, 2010 7:58 pm

ilovejedd wrote:Another thing, only 120GB and 240GB capacities were announced for the Onyx 2. It's possible OCZ may keep the Indilinx controllers for lower capacity offerings for a while.
Yeah, considering how cheap the lower-capacity Onyx units often are (the 32GB is often $50 or below AR) it fills a hole in their product lineup.

I picked one of the 32GBs up basically on a whim a few weeks back, due to the low price. Does the job as a boot drive on what's basically an overgrown HTPC, where getting the fastest read/write speeds aren't as important, but the non-existent seek times and silence do come in handy (MediaBrowser flies now, compared to the prior 640GB WD).

At that price point, if I want something better a bit down the road, it can always get tossed into a family member's laptop or what-not.

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by aristide1 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 8:57 pm

Yeah Onyx $57 after rebate, too many not recognized, too many DOA.

Comments like, "Faster than my 5400rpm hard drive."

My response, "My dead grandmother is faster than your 5400 rpm hard drive."

Very disappointed with Egg's Balck Friday sale.

Kingston 8G $45, good for ReadyBoost and what else? Slower than the Super Talent 8GB eSata flash drive for $40 on Amazon.

Kingston 64GB $90 after MIR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139134

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by Tzupy » Thu Nov 25, 2010 11:16 am

The newly introduced Intel G2 120GB is attractively priced (and yet not available in Romania), but I can't find reviews on its performance and reliability.
I am potentially interested to buy one to replace my laptop's 500GB snail-drive. I'm not sure if I can though, it's a Sony VAIO...

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by dhanson865 » Thu Nov 25, 2010 12:08 pm

Tzupy wrote:The newly introduced Intel G2 120GB is attractively priced (and yet not available in Romania), but I can't find reviews on its performance and reliability.
I am potentially interested to buy one to replace my laptop's 500GB snail-drive. I'm not sure if I can though, it's a Sony VAIO...
The official specs say it performs the same as the 160GB version. All Gen 2 drives have had sub 3% failure rates on newegg reviews and I expect the 120GB to be as reliable or more reliable (it may have more spare area if they are taking 160GB drives and changing the reported capacity).

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Re: SSD Reliability

Post by Eunos » Thu Nov 25, 2010 5:14 pm

The 120 GB would be my choice if buying today also.

Looks like the Vaio uses a regular 2.5" HDD, but I'd pull it out first to make sure it isn't IDE or something..

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