Which SSD to buy

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by procol, Mar 10, 2012.

  1. procol

    procol Member

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    Hi
    Im looking for a very reliable ssd it does not need to be the fastest or anything like that. It shuold be about 120gb size.
    I have been looking at the OCZ agility 3.
    Would that be a good choice or do u suggest some other ssd?
     
  2. ElementalDragon

    ElementalDragon Ancient Guru

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    I'm actually using an Agility 3, and love it.... but i don't recall the P5N having SATA3 ports. So, either you can kinda prepare for a potential future upgrade and get the Agility 3, or if you don't plan on upgrading for quite some time, i'd say maybe the Agility/Vertex 2?
     
  3. procol

    procol Member

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    ok nice, yeah im planning to upgrade to an Asus P8Z68-V LE and an i5 2500k
     
  4. ElementalDragon

    ElementalDragon Ancient Guru

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    Cool. Well then, i'd say your best bet for speed-on-a-buck would be the Agility 3. I thought about going to the Vertex when i bought mine, but honestly couldn't justify the price bump.... and haven't had an issue with the Agility.
     

  5. procol

    procol Member

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    ok great thx!
     
  6. Veteran

    Veteran Ancient Guru

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    I heard good things about the M4 crucial,seems to be very stable and dont bsod as much as other drivers providing you upgrade the bios on the drive first...i hear bad things about ocz,even my real life friend had constant bsods with ocz ssd's so he sent it back and got a crucial.
     
  7. ElementalDragon

    ElementalDragon Ancient Guru

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    I haven't had a BSOD with my Agility 3 yet.... and i've been using it for a solid couple months now.
     
  8. Lukc

    Lukc Guest

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    crucial m4 is probably cheapest and really reliable...
     
  9. TDurden

    TDurden Guest

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    I would say Intel 520 then. Intel is probably the only company I would buy a sandforce based drive atm.
    Plus you get 5 years warranty. Even if you dont use it for that long you can sell it later for a higher price.
     
  10. ElementalDragon

    ElementalDragon Ancient Guru

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    wouldn't exactly say the cheapest.... their 128GB SSD is about the same price as Intel's 120GB SSD.

    TDurden: Well... that's assuming you CAN sell the SSD. Selling storage media isn't usually the easiest thing to do, especially considering that SSD's do have a fairly limited lifespan, at least compared to HDD's. OCZ still gives you i believe a 3 year warranty. Pretty sure by the time anyone who purchased an SSD in the past year maybe will be using it for some time, and probably won't need to upgrade until SSD's are basically at the point where selling it to upgrade isn't really that worth it.
     

  11. Lukc

    Lukc Guest

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    i can found M4 in my country 128gb version for 148eur. everything else is 175eur+..
     
  12. TDurden

    TDurden Guest

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    Of course you can, I have sold many HDDs.
    That said a good SSD should last as long as traditional HDD or longer.
    I would buy Intel 520 not only because of 5 years warranty, but because it's fast and most of all should prove to be more reliable then other Sandforce based SSDs. If I would buy SSD now it would be my choice. But for now I already have one and it's also from Intel, albeit a bit slower one. I had zero problems with it and after 2.5 years reported wear out is minimal.
     
  13. Veteran

    Veteran Ancient Guru

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    So do the intel drives last longer than other drivers regarding deterioration over a few years?
     
  14. ElementalDragon

    ElementalDragon Ancient Guru

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    I think that would basically be down to what chips are used in the drives... and even then it would probably be hard to tell if one might deteriorate faster than the other.
     
  15. TDurden

    TDurden Guest

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    I don't know if Intel drives last longer than other SSDs but I would expect them to last at least last as long as other SSDs. Good quality memory chips and good wear leveling algorithms certainly helps.

    After 2.5 years of daily usage I don't see any deterioration. Swap and hybernate/hybrid sleep files are also on SSD. Basically standard windows configuration, I didn't change anything. I wanted to see how SSD will last myself. And the results seem to be congruent with my calculations. Basically you need a decade or more to wear out a good SSD with standard usage.

    In fact "a decade" might be conservative to say..

    Lets do some math. MLC flash is rated for 10.000 write on average. Let's be a bit more conservative and say 5.000 cycles.
    160GB x 5.000 = 800.000GB
    Let's say daily writes are 10GB (with swap file etc). With relaxed wear leveling of 1.3 it makes 13GB per day.
    That makes it 61.538 days or more then 168 years.
    Did I miss something? Even if I did (please correct me) we are talking about quite a few years :)

    What does my SSD show itself?
    Media Wearout Indicator shows 97 (down from 99 the first day, I assume it starts showing 99 when you start using it)

    Explanation from Intel SSD Toolbox help:

    Now as I said it actually starts from 99 so it means after two and half years value change by 2.
    99 / 2 = 49.5
    2.5 yeas * 49.5 = 123.75 years (!?)


    EDIT: yeah, I missed something. In practical usage drive is partially filled with data and afaik it's not moved automatically unless files are deleted/changed or manual optimization is run. So drive will not always have all the space for wear leveling. But still.. not all space is used under normal usage pattern, files do change and SSDs actually have spare area specifically for wear leveling. Afaik my Intel X25-M G2 160GB has about 11GB of it. So we can still count many years, decades (?)
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2012

  16. Veteran

    Veteran Ancient Guru

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    Thanks for sharing your experience with ssd's ill certainly keep Intel drives in mind and will do some thorough research on the whole ssd subject when the time comes of me actually purchasing :)
     
  17. Valagard

    Valagard Guest

    Price, Agility 3

    Performance, Vertex 3, M4 or Intel 520

    Longevity, Intel 520 or Vertex 3, Vertex 3 is second cause sometimes they use different chips then Intel, but -most- of the time they are the exact same chips
     
  18. Bentez

    Bentez Guest

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    What about Corsair's Force GT or Mushkin Chronos 120? I don't think theres much between any of the Sandforce drives to be honest
     
  19. Valagard

    Valagard Guest

    Corsair Force GT can read large files faster then the Vertex 3, but for multiple access, jumping between tons of small files etc the Vertex 3 is faster
     
  20. Sash

    Sash Ancient Guru

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    Kingston HyperX is not bad as well, very good performance, over 500MB/s on both reads and writes, it uses the latest sandforce 2281 controller, i dont know how it performs, no CPU to power my rig :( but i got it based on reviews, and the fact that is basically the same sandforce chip as in: crucial m4, ocz agility and vertex 3, intel 520, of all these SSDs, it has the best speeds at least in numbers, maybe the others are limited by firmware, don't know
     

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