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I've been thinking about getting a SSD drive for a while to work along side my current 1TB hard drive.
What are people's thought on the new OCZ synapse SSD? Is it worth the money or should I just get a regular drive such as the crucial M4 but make sure I've got my O/S and frequently used files on that?
i personally would try and by a corsair one because of the warranty they offer.
Probably not if you read the Hexus review it says that " Underneath its lid, the Syanpse is essentially a second-generation SATA 6Gbps SandForce SSD." and that "the 64GB drive actually provides a cache size of 32GB." I've heard people have complaints about OCZ in the past as well. And £100 for 64Gb is now quite overpriced, let alone 32Gb- the corsair force 3 is only £78 from scan and the M4 is £88. I'd go for crucial or corsair- best balance of speed,cost and customer service.
I have just finished installing one of these, it arrived this afternoon and has been running in my PC about 2 hours now so I am just breaking it in. But already I'm seeing improvements in my startup and shut down times and that was after just 3 restarts.Quote:
Originally Posted by whobi
Yes, you only get half the stated capacity because the drive over provisions memory to improve durability, that way as memory modules start to fail the drive will swap to unused chips as the OCZ have anticipated that the extra write/rewrite cycles may take a toll on the drive's lifespan otherwise. As for Sandforce, as far as I know it was the 2280 chipset that caused issues for people and that the 2281 chipset fixed these issues, on top of that the Synapse drives have a custom OCZ firmware that handles the over provisioning of the chips and along with the Dataplex software the should perform in a similar way to the Z68 SRT technology, only these drives will work with RAID volumes.
If you want performance levels close to running a standard SSD without the need to manage where you install your programs due to space constraints then I think a Synapse drive would be a great solution and that's the reason why I bought one. Given a few days of 'normal' use and I will have a better idea of just how well this drive works, so I can post back then but in the meantime I think it is worth it based on the improvements I've already seen.
I would go for reliability rather than speed, go for the Crucial M4.
Well, just to let you know, I'm so impressed by this drive, my wake from sleep on this PC is now so fast that my monitors can't wake up fast enough now. My start up time is about the same as my wake from sleep state was before I got the drive and shut down is super fast too.