SSDs - State of the Product?

How long did it take you to get those drives back from the RMA? Also, did newegg ship them to you?
 
SSDs in general are not very mature and not so unreliable, excepting perhaps the latter Intel drives. What choices are there in HDs? One of every five Samsungs is deefctive from teh get go, Hitachis are noisy, hot and have low STR, and Seagate is just teh suck. :(
 
I can't tell if this one is or not. This page on Kingston's website suggests only the E-Series 32 GB and 64GB drives are rebadged Intel. There is some other discussion of the 40GB V-Series was an Intel rebadge.

If this drive is a rebadged, it's a decent price after rebate for 128GB.
 
Mercutio said:
Aren't the Kingston drives rebadged Intel X-25s?
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AFAIK, Kingston has nine series of SSDs. Only the SNE-125 and SNM225 are rebadged Intel drives. The others have Toshiba controllers and are slower. The SNM225 (Intel X-M drive) are listed has being discontinued.
 
They stand out as having possibly the poorest write performance of any current SSD. Sequential throughput is good, transactions per second is low.

Why would you bother?
 
Yeah, and they won't have a good firmware for a few months after that. Anyway, I'm skeptical that it will be that much faster. I don't trust that highly compressible data claim.
 
Or a PSD, PSB, mp3, most audio/video files, etc. What files are highly compressible, TIFF, WAV and uncompressed video? Maybe MS Office files?
 
MS Office, most OS/App files, most program data files, some databases. The only files where major effort has been put into compression is multimedia.
 
LunarMist said:
Yeah, and they won't have a good firmware for a few months after that. Anyway, I'm skeptical that it will be that much faster. I don't trust that highly compressible data claim.
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Maybe you'd prefer Micron's C400 then.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4086/microns-realssd-c400-uses-25nm-nand-at-161gb-offers-415mbs-reads

It looks like they're putting their money on better flash, rather than a fancier controller. As long as it's evolutionary and not revolutionary, it should come out of the gate cleaner. And it will be here sooner.
 
Maybe 72TB is enough, though I don't like having to buy 256GB drives for the higher performance. We have not heard much noise about the C300 series SSDs which is probably a good thing.
 
The dirty little secret is that as flash process shrinks the number of times you can reprogram the chip drops. So, as it gets faster and cheaper it also gets less reliable / durable.
 
I think it has been known for some years, but the .2x nm cells have recently brought the issue into the spotlight.
 
Stereodude said:
The dirty little secret is that as flash process shrinks the number of times you can reprogram the chip drops. So, as it gets faster and cheaper it also gets less reliable / durable.
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It would seem a parallel exists with magnetic storage as well. I don't think the technology is necessarily at fault, but rather the manufacturers' (as well as our own) acceptance of performance, price, and reliability for a given product.
 
Stereodude said:
The dirty little secret is that as flash process shrinks the number of times you can reprogram the chip drops. So, as it gets faster and cheaper it also gets less reliable / durable.
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I think that's the crux of the Sandforce controller versus Micron flash difference.

Sandforce is trying to deal with the reduced number of writes with their fancy controller tricks. Micron is doing it with fancy flash chip tricks.

I haven't seen anything on drives using the new Sandforce controller, but Micron is saying that the C400 will accept as many writes as the C300 does now. It looks like we're good until the next die shrink.
 
Where is Intel in all this and how do they handle the SSD write cycle limitations? :bsmurf:
 
The next Sandy Bridge chipset/Intel storage driver revision looks like it may have an interesting trick up it's sleeve... SSD caching. I wonder how relevant the Seagate Momentus XT will be after that ships? (assuming it's true...)

..."Z68 is also slated to support something called SSD Caching, which Intel hasn’t said anything to us about yet. With version 10.5 of Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology drivers, Z68 will support SSD caching. This sounds like the holy grail of SSD/HDD setups, where you have a single drive letter and the driver manages what goes on your SSD vs. HDD. Whether SSD Caching is indeed a DIY hybrid hard drive technology remains to be seen. It’s also unclear whether or not P67/H67 will get SSD Caching once 10.5 ships."...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/6
 
LiamC said:
The next Sandy Bridge chipset/Intel storage driver revision looks like it may have an interesting trick up it's sleeve... SSD caching. I wonder how relevant the Seagate Momentus XT will be after that ships? (assuming it's true...)
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Looks like Marvell was not the only ones thinking ahead. I think it makes total sense. The Momentus may only be relevant for laptops and other single drive systems in the future.
 
Howell said:
Looks like Marvell was not the only ones thinking ahead. I think it makes total sense. The Momentus may only be relevant for laptops and other single drive systems in the future.
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Possibly. It would still be nice to have a 2TB drive with 60GB of flash and choose to have buffering or individual use. The 3.5" drives should have enough room for packing the memory on circuit boards.
 
Has anyone tried it yet? After 26 months I figure it is not worth fixing what is not broken.
 
I'm thinking of buying a Crucial C300 SSD. Is there anything special to do installing an operating system on it. ( Acronis or clean install? )
 
Why would that be needed? Does performance sink like an OCZ drive dropped in the ocean from 65km?
 
Unless I missed something all drives will have at least some performance loss if the data isn't aligned. Why would the C300 be different?
 
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