New SSD - Samsung, Intel or Crucial

If you really really really care about your data, buy Intel. They're the only drives with a proven track record of doing the right thing in worst-case scenarios. Consumer-level drives like the Crucial M4 are fine for a gaming PC, really fine for that - but if your livelihood hinges on whether or not your data is in a known good state, then it's a terrible choice.

Using a Crucial M4 for 6 months, so far so good. I've had bad experience with an Adata Sandforce mSATA SSD burned itself to death so no more Sandforce for me.

Crucial M4 for me. The Samsung is just as good

I thought i might throw this into the mix...I've had my 256gb 830 for just over a week now and I love it, my main rig (AMD 965 BE) has always been a quick booter, mainly because I ensure that it only fires up the essentials, but with this SSD it's 10 seconds from first click to desktop. However, when I first tried to format it I used my i3 laptop and try as I might I couldn't get the SSD to format. It would go as far as loading the files but would then freeze when trying to run them. I have no idea what caused this but when I get around to installing the now formatted SSD in the laptop I will be interested to see if it still has problems.

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Originally Posted by DennisMenace

That is what I thought, mainly from reading Anandtech's review. So I went ahead and bought the 120gb 520 (~£150 back in April), only to get repeated (but not repeatable) BSODs of the F4/9F variety, characteristic of the 'Sandforce Bug'.

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Yeah, this is the nightmare scenario I could see happening to me and is why I opted for the 830. Considering they're also more expensive than the 830s atm, it's a no-brainer which to go for imho.

99% of users will recommend Crucial, I guess it is good choice.
I had Vertex 2E 60Gb before, then swapped with Crucial M4 128GB - haven't noticed big difference i speeds but it is fast drive. I guess at some point speeds between SSDs are not that noticeable as between them and HDDs.

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Originally Posted by Agent

If you're talking about OCZ/ Sandforce based drives there then it's not even close to being sub 0.5%. It's closer to 3% if you take the figures from retailers : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-...omposants.html

Now 3% still doesn't sound much (although still too high), but when you consider that these drives can be no where near their MTBF, it's a worrying figure.

Where is your figure from?

All the figures in the world don't make drawing conclusions any easier though with all the firmware updates.

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Unfortunately I cant remember exactly where my "sub-0.5%" figure came from. A review/article lost somewhere in my browsing history... (sorry)

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Originally Posted by phinix

99% of users will recommend Crucial, I guess it is good choice.
I had Vertex 2E 60Gb before, then swapped with Crucial M4 128GB - haven't noticed big difference i speeds but it is fast drive. I guess at some point speeds between SSDs are not that noticeable as between them and HDDs.

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I think the Samsung just about edges the M4 for user recommendations, this thread being a good example of this.

Im surprised you didnt notice a difference between the Vertex 2E and the M4, the sequential read/write on the M4 is nearly double. Although, when compared to a HDD, theres less of a gap in 4K performance. So general application usage etc wont be massively boosted.