Another 'help me choose an SSD' thread - but slightly narrowed down...

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silencer51

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So I'm thinking of jumping into the SSD bandwagon.

I've been on Raptor and Velociraptor RAID 0s for the past few years, and I've been very satisfied with them. However, SSDs they are not.

I have an X58 board but when LGA2011 comes out I'm gonna upgrade. So with that in mind, I think I'm gonna go with SATA III drives, just to be a little more future proof.

The question is - which ones?

At first the Vertex 3 seemed the obvious choice but the various horror stories and OCZ's attitude towards its customers kinda scared me.

Intel has the best reliability track record but the 510 seems to be inferior to other offerings within its price range.

Lastly, there's the 320 300gb model which looks nice, however its a SATA II drive.

I'm gonna be using 2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. So the drives in question need to have good GC. At minimum I want 400-500gb of total space.

What do you guys recommend?
 
As most people will tell you on these forums stay away from the Sandforce drives, especially OCZ.

Right now your best choices for SATA III SSDs are the Intel 320 (EDIT: Intel 510) family and also Crucial M4. Why do you require to run them in RAID, you're really not gaining that much and also losing TRIM.
 
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Cmustang87 said:
Right now your best choices for SATA III SSDs are the Intel 320 family and also Crucial M4. Why do you require to run them in RAID, you're really not gaining that much and also losing TRIM.
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Intel 320 series are SATA 3Gbps. I guess you meant Intel 510 series, which are SATA 6Gbps.

But I'd still choose the 320 over the 510 in most situations, since the 320 has some extra reliability features built in, and in most situations the speed difference is barely noticeable.
 
john4200 said:
Intel 320 series are SATA 3Gbps. I guess you meant Intel 510 series, which are SATA 6Gbps.

But I'd still choose the 320 over the 510 in most situations, since the 320 has some extra reliability features built in, and in most situations the speed difference is barely noticeable.
Click to expand...

My mistake, that's what I get for bouncing around a bunch of threads. :)
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Yeah I have heard a lot of Sandforce horror stories.. And also a lot of good things about Intel's SSDs.

The Crucial m4 uses the same Marvell controller as the 510 but I've read bad things about its garbage collection.

Right now I'm between the 320 and 510. Which of these two has the best GC?

Also, I checked out Intel's discussion forum, apparently the 320s have a nasty firmware bug that causes the drive to become unreadable after a power cycle (!?).

I'm interested in a RAID 0 for both speed and storage space reasons (two drives are cheaper than one large drive). As long as the drives have proper GC I don't think the lack of TRIM is gonna be a big problem - if the drives get too dirty, I can always image the array on an external drive, secure erase the SSDs and then restore.. right?
 
silencer51 said:
Also, I checked out Intel's discussion forum, apparently the 320s have a nasty firmware bug that causes the drive to become unreadable after a power cycle (!?).
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That is the first I have heard of that. Do you have a link?

I've power cycled my 320 SSDs quite a few times, and I can still read them, so there is obviously more to it than you stated.
 
Here's the link:

http://communities.intel.com/thread/22227?tstart=0

Obviously its not a widespread problem but some users have all had the same experience (drive showing up as only 8mb during POST).

I've decided I'm gonna go with two 250gig 510s or 2 300gig 320s if I find them a lot cheaper than the 510s (so far the prices are about the same for the 2 models at these sizes)
 
Thanks for the link. That '8MB bug' is disappointing to me in two ways. First is that Intel let something like that slip through their QC -- previous Intel SSD bugs were not this serious IMO (one caused a slowdown, the other caused data loss but only in rare cases where people were using the SATA password). This bug sounds like the SSD can lose its data randomly from a power cycle. The other thing that is disappointing is that the first report seems to be from May 17: 'JW' says they sent the drives back to Intel and are expecting pre-release new firmware to test. If 'JW' is legitimate, that means Intel has known about the problem for more than a month, but has apparently not commented on it. A heads-up would have been nice.
 
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I think it somewhat depends on how much writing you plan to do to the drive, but the suggestions I would start with are:

1) Intel 510 240 GB. Faster than a Vertex 3 on compressed or random data and pretty much the same speed on compressible data. A very nice drive. Just a bit overpriced at the moment. Note that the 120 GB version reads about as fast but writes at about half the speed. Intel reliability trumps every other manufacturer. And, at least in theory, it's 34nm flash memory has the largest number of program/erase cycles. You also get Intel's SSD Optimizer software which allows you to TRIM the drive in other Windows OSes besides Win7. An Intel SSD is the only drive that can do that. And compared to a Sandforce drive there is no write throttling to worry about.

2) Crucial C300 or M4. 128 GB or 256 GB. Very fast read speeds. Very competitive writes as well. Doesn't rely data compression to get good speeds. Pricing tends to be very competitive even against the Sandforce drives. No write throttling.

3) Sandforce SF-2200 SATA III drives like OCZ Vertex 3, OWC Mercury Extreme Pro, Corsair GT, Patriot Wildfire, Mushkin Chronos. 120 GB or 240 GB. Very fast for compressible data in both reading and writing. Even when the data is incompressible still one of the fastest drives in both reading and writing. Pricing tends to be very competitive even with Crucial drives.

History of reliability problems and the recent compatibility issues. Drives may or may not be compatible with your system. If they are not compatible expect random BSODs. Because it is a compatibility issue a replacement drive won't help you. You may or may not be able to get a refund.

Warranty Throttling. Sandforce has a "feature" called DuraClass which can choke off your writes down to as low as 6 MB/sec if the controller logic decides you have written too much data for too long a period of time. How much is "too long" or "too much" is basically unknown and will likely change depending on the drive vendor and/or firmware version. This feature is unpredictable, undocumented, and can be altered, enabled, or disabled at any time with a firmware update. Mushkin will allegedly be disabling a small part of this write throttling in their upcoming Chronos drives, but only the throttling that limits peak write speed.

Even the best of these drives seem to lose more speed than other SSDs over time even after TRIMs, probably due to lazy garbage collection which helps to extend the life of the drive. Due to the on-the-fly compression these drives will likely have the capability to write more than most drives if you deal mostly with compressible data. So expect a long life, backed up and enforced by the Warranty Throttling.
 
About garbage collection, it's worth noting that it's undocumented for all SSDs, just like wear leveling algorithms, so it's really tricky to predict how new drives will fare over time (as for duraclass, I have never experienced any choking on my Vertex2, but I don't use my drive for benchmarking...).

For me it seems a little strange to have waited so long to "get on the SSD bandwagon" when there are deals for 100$ ones that already put to shame any hard drive, and suddenly wanting to go with two 300GB in RAID !
 
True, there are some great deals out there, however the past year and a half has been a 'no upgrade' period for me. Plus, I've been really happy with my Velociraptor RAID 0. But now I have the money to spend on 2 SSDs and I'm itching for an upgrade, so... :)

I'm liking the 510 more and more. Here in Greece the 250GB version costs pretty much the same as the Vertex 3 240GB and the 320 300GB (around 500 euros).

Another drive I was considering was the Corsair Force 3 which, in my mind, seemed to combine Sandforce speeds with Corsair's supposed "better than OCZ" reliability (I only have experience with their PSUs which are excellent). However it seems the various compatibility issues are a Sandforce problem...
 
The 510 is not that bad. The only benchmark that the Vertex 3 crushes it on is the 4K random WRITE. 4K Random Read they are very close to each other, and for Sequential Read/Write they are again fairly close. In practice you are reading more then you are writing. So I felt the 510, given its (percieved) conservative ratings for reliability was the better choice.

Bought one for my Dad for fathers day...was between the 510 and the Vertex 3.

I have had no problems with my Intel 160GB G2 nor my OCZ Agility 2 64GB and Microcenter 64GB so Intel and Sanforce have both been fine for me so far.
 
That's a good point about the random writes. All the Intel SSDs seem to do quite badly at that. I wonder why. It's questionable how that will translate into real world performance though. There are very few "real world" benchmarks to go by. Anand has one and in that the 510 does quite well. It even came in first place on some real world benchmarks like his Heavy Workload 2011 Disk Busy Time for writes. It only came in 7th place for read busy times though. I think you have to kind of choose which metric to go by when selecting these drives. Different drives are good at different things. There's no question the Sandforce drives are very fast all around, even on incompressible data, but they have some drawbacks. If someone found a way to hack the firmware to disable the warranty throttling I might very well buy one, preferably from a vendor that allows full refunds for compatibility issues.
 
Aaargh. Now that I've finally settled on the 510 and I'm ready to place an order, I come upon Intel's 2011 SSD roadmap. Apparently the 520 is set for release in a few months, along with a new PCI-E SSD line!

I've always thought that a RevoDrive-style implementation with Intel's reliability would be a match made in heaven and now I find out its going to become reality!

So now, once again, I'm thinking of waiting a few months more... :/
 
silencer51 said:
Aaargh. Now that I've finally settled on the 510 and I'm ready to place an order, I come upon Intel's 2011 SSD roadmap. Apparently the 520 is set for release in a few months, along with a new PCI-E SSD line!

I've always thought that a RevoDrive-style implementation with Intel's reliability would be a match made in heaven and now I find out its going to become reality!

So now, once again, I'm thinking of waiting a few months more... :/
Click to expand...

In a few months when the 520 and pci-e hardware comes out, there will be news of the next gen another few months down the line. In the pc world, there will ALWAYS be something better to trump the current hardware. You never win if you play the waiting game.
 
You 're right, however a PCI-E based SSD would be ideal for my needs. Up until now the only affordable bootable PCI-E SSD was the RevoDrive. An Intel option changes things, in a good way...

I'll have to think this through.
 
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