Best SSDs For The Money: August 2012 (Archive)

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Right now techreport is doing a long term reliability test for SSDs. all the ssd's tested have now hit 200TB of writes/erases without failing. They've been running this test since august and plan to keep going till they fail.

The only one which isn't degrading in either performance or losing clusters, and which hasn't given any bad data writes is a Corsair Neutron GTX. The Samsung 840 pro, Samsung 840, Kingston Hyperx 3k, Intel 335 all have made it this far... but all are developing bad clusters and small degradation in speeds. The samsung pro is the closest to death right now according to the monitoring software.

Interestingly the Corsair and Kingston drives are also the only SSD to provide it's advertised read/write speeds... the Samsung and Samsung Pro doesn't come close apparently. With the Corsair providing almost 2x the long term performance speeds over the 840 Pro.

not to pimp for corsair but that techreport study has sold me on the neutron gtx. (that said all those listed SSDs have hit 200tb in a grueling torture test, not one failing, and all probably going to go much longer. If anyone uses 200TB of heavy write/erase in 5 years of use i'll be interested to meet them.

Modern SSDs are very reliable... assuming you have a dependable power-supply.
 
Please correct the listing for the 2 M500's, I believe both of them have the same "other" features being TCG OPAL 2 and eDrive, it's misleading and implies there is a tradeoff for going with a larger size, correct me if i'm wrong.
 
OCZ is looking to be leaking cash like a sieve. I wouldn't buy one for two reasons. Reliability and lack of the ability to warranty the device when they inevitably go out of business soon.
 
Oh all of this ocz hate makes me laugh.
So this one guy lost his trust in companys products because they launched some new chip models with unstable firmware, which has since been fixed, and now claims that they only float on their premium name.

If you really want to bash this company any further please atleast use more up-to-date references to keep your credibility.
 
I think compression should be done filesystem-level, not ssd-controller-level. Because, you see, the way it's currently being done the 6 gb/s SATA link is a bottleneck. It's a pity Windows can't boot from a filesystem with on the fly compression (NTFS can have compression but it's not bootable) like Linux and MacOSX can. That said, the cpu can become a bottleneck in RAID-configs. Still, it should be an option.
 
I've had two different OCZ Vector 512gb drives. BOTH failed with complete data loss. I have the third warranty replacement sitting on my shelf. I will not install it.
 
OCZ has a lot of hate because (IMHO) they have deserved it. True, they now have some high quality products. However, they have a history of putting products on the market with either very low quality or complete lack of QA.

Right now, there are 91 different OCZ drives listed on Newegg, more than any other vendor. Why so many? For one, only 23 of these are actual drive models. The rest are "Refurbished". That alone tells a story of poor QA resulting in returned drives. I have received many Newegg flyers advertising these "Refurbished" drives at rock-bottom prices. I have been tempted on a few occasions..... that is until I read the reality of the reviews. At that point, I back off - not wanting to live with the hassle of re-installing an OS and programs due to a failed drive.

On top of the number of refurbished drives, the average customer rating for the OCZ drives is much lower than other manufacturers. Their latest generation seems to be doing well. The percentage of 1-star ratings for the Vertex 4 drives is consistently in the single digits. However, contrast that with 1-star rating percentages for previous generation of drives. Vertex 3 and Agility series are consistently in the mid-to-high teens, so not so good for those products. Then you have the 450 series and the outright bust Revo-drive, which garner 1-star rating percentages in the high 30's.

All of this adds up to too many products released with poor quality control, which is going to lead to a lack of trust among the consumer market.

Contrast this with Samsung. You will not find a single Samsung SSD with a 1-star rating above 10%. And the most reviewed 840 pro drives are sitting at an astonishing 5%.

Bottom line is that Samsung has QA down. OCZ is learning the hard way. Based on the history of poor quality control and reliability, it's to be expected that OCZ is going to have a lot of hate out there, especially among all those people who've been burned with a bad drive. Correcting a reputation for poor quality is a long uphill battle.
 
Yes. Earlier their were minor firmware issues which caused the hardware to be at fault. I have been using the sandforce based controllers for a while now especially Intel 5** series which are neat.I constantly keep updating the firmwares which surely helps!
 
Speaking of Samsung's cloning software...

When I attempted to migrate from the HD in my i7 Samsung laptop to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, not only did the migration fail, but it trashed my HD.
 
Kind of disappointed in no mention of the 840 Evo
at $99 for a 120 gb on Newegg it gives respectable performance for the money and should have had an honorable mention IMHO
did real well in every review I have read (about 5 of them) and has a great suite of software
I have had mine for about two months and plan on getting another one for my second rig (future Server 2008 WDS machine and Folding at Home rig)
 
Kind of disappointed in no mention of the 840 Evo
at $99 for a 120 gb on Newegg it gives respectable performance for the money and should have had an honorable mention IMHO
did real well in every review I have read (about 5 of them) and has a great suite of software
I have had mine for about two months and plan on getting another one for my second rig (future Server 2008 WDS machine and Folding at Home rig)
 
The whole point behind not using OCZ anything is that their products are not up to par versus other manufacturers. This holds true for the power supplies and SSDs. Their RAM got so bad, they left the market. Focusing on SSDs was NOT the only reason OCZ left the RAM market.
For several years they were without question the most troublesome, unfinished (releasing a product unfinished is flatly in excusable) products. They had the highest problem and failure rates in the industry. This is factual. Once a company has "turned off" a consumer with poor products and bad decision making, it takes a lot of time making top notch products to entice these consumers to give someone like OCZ a chance. It is the old adage: You can do 20 things well, even excellent, but that 21rst thing you did wrong, just erased the previous 20. Is this fair? No, but it is reality.
When OCZ can show me several years of competent and competing products across their entire SSD line as well as their other products, I will give them the chance they have earned. Until then. Just say NO to OCZ.
 


This is very true. As a general rule, one should compress first, and encrypt later. I can't think of an easy way to do this to an entire drive currently, except indeed trying to find a drive that has hardware encryption. Problem is, as far as I know, all of these are external ones. Maybe if you could find an eSATA one that does this you could hack its enclosure into a hardware encryptor, but most of them are USB I think. That said, there's no reason to encrypt your OS and most of your applications, and many other data types are often already compressed. I myself run a compressed filesystem, and except for the executable files, the gains aren't that big. But of course, those are the ones you want to load quickly, so this is where compression helps the most.
 


I think a number of SSDs and HDDs do have hardware encryption, but the issue is that you can't really trust them - too many places to put backdoors etc.

Plus it's often tied to a TPM rather than a key, meaning that if either a) someone gets both your laptop and the HDD, they can read the data, and b) if your laptop dies but your drive is OK, you can't decrypt it.
 


I didn't know that. That seems like a pretty big security flaw. I'm not sure how you'd get around this. I can think of a few ways, like using ZFS or dm-crypt with a compressing filesystem of your choosing, but really, it's probably more trouble than it's worth compared to simply running an encrypted system and not worrying about compression. If you can get it to work, it'd be awesome, but I'm pretty sure I'd just mess it up. The only thing that needs encrypting on my pc, really, is my e-mail and my passwords, so I do those separately.
 
I thought OCZ was going bankrupt I wouldn't buy anything OCZ because of that. Its been my experience most people tend to stick with brands they have had the least issues with. You can have 20 good experiences but its the one bad one you remember. It doesn't mean a person is stupid its just human nature.
 
if many people complain about one manufacturer like OCZ like we have seen here and on the web than it is reasonable to be cautious buying their products
one of the reason techs go to sites is to get reviews and opinions on products
 
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