Opinion on SSD

[F022Y]

If i may i would like your opinions on SSD drives, currently i'm looking for a pair of 120GB to run in raid 0 for OS and games, i already have a 500GB as storage on the machine and a 2TB NAS.

The ones i've been looking at are:-

OCZ vertex 3
Corsair force 3
Mushkin Chronos

I've looked at their respected forums and the corsair seems to be flooded with faults after the latest firmware update, but i realise that they can't all be bad.

Machine setup is currently as below but planning on changing the MoBo to an ASUS Crosshair V in the next month.

Asus Crosshair III
AMD Phenom 2 X4 965
4GB Geil DDR3 1600MHz (soon to be G.Skill 8GB F3-12800CL7D-8GBXH)

Cheers in advance

[pauldarkside]

Whatever you choose, please ensure you have a robust backup solution. Even if you're primarily a gamer, losing game saves is a PITA.

My SSD unexpectedly failed when I went to boot up the PC on Sunday morning - no longer recognised in the BIOS. Considering it was their Labor Day weekend, I didn't expect to get any support from OCZ until at least Tuesday. Fortunately, there was a mod available on their support forums and within a few hours, my issues were resolved. The only recourse was a destructive flash though - without a backup, I'd have been screwed.

[F022Y]

Machine does a full backup on Friday night and incrementals on monday and wednesday to the NAS, not to mention the ghost images lol

[F022Y]

Been reading up and i thing mushkin is going to be the way forward, also their forum seems much better in terms of support from mushkin directly.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would look at the Crucial M4 128GB. The latest firmware performance does improve read speeds massively.

[F022Y]

performance still doesn't look as good as the mushkin for the extra £20 odd quid, would be interested if anyone has first hand experiance of them though.

[onethreehill]

Vertex 3 is the fastest, it is using SandForce SF-2281 with 25nm Synchronous NAND

Corsair Force 3 and Mushkin Chronos are using SandForce SF-2281 with 25nm Asynchronous NAND

[F022Y]

I thought they used Asynchronous like the corsair?

And while on the subject, in real world terms what is the impact of data compression? I would have though that it would be a good thing due to less fragmented files (if I understand this correctly), but it seems that synchronous is better for gamers and raid 0 setups from reviews I've read.

[kalniel]

I thought they used Asynchronous like the corsair?

And while on the subject, in real world terms what is the impact of data compression? I would have though that it would be a good thing due to less fragmented files (if I understand this correctly), but it seems that synchronous is better for gamers and raid 0 setups from reviews I've read.

For most intents and purposes fragmentation doesn't exist on SSDs - that's a term from mechanical disks where physical data location is of any relevance.

In real world terms it means that there is less writing to flash going on with drives - this extends the usable lifespan on the SSD and works around slower write speeds which can be a bottleneck. However not all data is compressible.

[F022Y]

So Asynchronous is suitable for what I'm trying to do?

I understand that in some instances (mushkins offering for example) that when SSDs are in raid 0 that TRIM isn't available does this matter? From reading their forum they suggest powering down the machine for several hours a week to allow the garbage collection to do it's thing (whatever that is) and make sure that BIOS is set to not power down HDDs.

I just want to be on the safe side before forking out best part of £300 on a pair of SSD only to find I've bought the wrong type.

Cheers for all the input by the way guys!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So Asynchronous is suitable for what I'm trying to do?

I understand that in some instances (mushkins offering for example) that when SSDs are in raid 0 that TRIM isn't available does this matter? From reading their forum they suggest powering down the machine for several hours a week to allow the garbage collection to do it's thing (whatever that is) and make sure that BIOS is set to not power down HDDs.

I just want to be on the safe side before forking out best part of £300 on a pair of SSD only to find I've bought the wrong type.

Cheers for all the input by the way guys!

The Crucial M4 is among the most reliable current generation SSDs. On xtremesystems a chap wrote 171TB of data on to a 64GB one and it is still going strong with no throttling.

With the latest Crucial firmware read speeds have increased by 20% and yet is seems to be one of the cheapest 128GB drives with synchronous NAND:

http://www.techpowerup.com/151255/Cr...ds-by-20-.html

It is around £135 to £140 too.

The 256GB version is cheaper than similar drives too:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cruci...-write-260mb-s

[F022Y]

I have seen them CAT, very interested but again is the only difference between synchronous and asynchronous NAND down to compression and such reliability? I just want to get my head round these differences before making a purchase.

[kalniel]

I have seen them CAT, very interested but again is the only difference between synchronous and asynchronous NAND down to compression and such reliability? I just want to get my head round these differences before making a purchase.

Nope - synchronicity is a separate consideration from compression. Compression is how sandforce drives get their high speeds and low wear rates. Only sandforce drives do this. Synchronous and asynchronous NAND is about the underlying speed of the flash memory in the device. Synchronous is a little faster.

Crucial drives don't use sandforce controllers, so don't do any compression. However they have had fewer compatibility problems than the most recent sandforce drives, and they're still blindingly quick - I doubt you'd spot the difference.

[wasabi]

Wishing I hadn't bothered with SSD now. A month in with my 60 gig Vertex 2, and the number of SSD related crashes makes it a pain in the ass. Yes I've changed drivers, cables, firmware etc etc. The other (normal 5400 rpm) drive in the same machine hasn't caused a single issue. I love the silence and speed, but doing a bit off googling on SSD problems rather than just reading the usual 'ooh this is great and fast, I've got free stuff to review' websites paints a different picture.

[Sputnik]

Wishing I hadn't bothered with SSD now. A month in with my 60 gig Vertex 2, and the number of SSD related crashes makes it a pain in the ass. Yes I've changed drivers, cables, firmware etc etc. The other (normal 5400 rpm) drive in the same machine hasn't caused a single issue. I love the silence and speed, but doing a bit off googling on SSD problems rather than just reading the usual 'ooh this is great and fast, I've got free stuff to review' websites paints a different picture.

It might help if you said what your system specs are and how you went about installing the drive and how you installed the OS on it.

If you trawl the internet you'll find positive and negative reviews on just about anything. Alot of the time people who slate something as being bad are the ones who never try to solve the issues before writing it off as a bad device.

[wasabi]

It might help if you said what your system specs are and how you went about installing the drive and how you installed the OS on it.

If you trawl the internet you'll find positive and negative reviews on just about anything. Alot of the time people who slate something as being bad are the ones who never try to solve the issues before writing it off as a bad device.

Quite agree - I thought it would be the usual case of dumb people who don't know how to enable AHCI or whatever and I'd be OK. But I've been up and down the OCZ support forums and tried all the known fixes. Very hard to get a meaningful picture on reliability, but I wish I'd paid more attention to the sheer number of people complaining of SSD issues. Funnily enough I went for the vertex 2 specifically as it was bit older (basically EOL) so firmware should be more 'mature'.