Which SSD?

[farlex85]

It would appear my raptor has finally crapped out on me, forcing me to pursue new booting apparati. I'm essentially looking for some help wading through the seemingly endless options for ssd's. I'm thinking 128gb probably and bang/buck is where I prefer to buy. Currently I was eying the crucial m4 @ microcenter for $179. Any other suggestions are welcome though, preferably at fry's or microcenter as I'd rather not wait to get my machine back up and running, but a killer deal online is certainly worth waiting for.

[crazyeyesreaper]

id take the Crucial M4 at $180 for a 128gb that you can firmware upgrade to 0009 for 500+ mb's read and 170 or so mb/s write speeds its pretty damn good and its not a sandforce drive so thats a win in my book, im actually looking at getting the 256gb myself

[MxPhenom 216]

Originally Posted by crazyeyesreaper

id take the Crucial M4 at $180 for a 128gb that you can firmware upgrade to 0009 for 500+ mb's read and 170 or so mb/s write speeds its pretty damn good and its not a sandforce drive so thats a win in my book, im actually looking at getting the 256gb myself

whats wrong with the new SATA III sandforce drives? Im just wondering

[entropy13]

The M4 is a good bang-for-buck SSD as much as performance go, and relatively cheap in terms of $/GB, for an SSD. The firmware update would further increase performance as well.

[crazyeyesreaper]

Originally Posted by nvidiaintelftw

whats wrong with the new SATA III sandforce drives? Im just wondering

uh did you forget all the issues with the OCZ vertex and agility 3 drives using sandforce and the problems faced by Corsair and there newer drives, with the sandforce controller?

Ill just take the M4 read speeds are similar to the Sandforce drives write speeds arent that great but 170 on the 128gb and 280 on the 256gb are more then enough and ill take the chance on crucial

since crucial which is the consumer brand for Micron and Intel are both joint partners in IM flash Tech or w.e basically 51% intel 49% Micron so intel and micron are essentially sharing tech when it comes to SSD's so ill take the faster Micron speeds and the far lower price with a bit better reliability over the newer sandforce drives which while they are improving still arent where they need to be.

[techtard]

The m4 will be a good buy. You won't get anywhere near their rated speeds though, you'll be using sata 3gbps instead of sata 6gbps.

[TheOne]

Originally Posted by nvidiaintelftw

whats wrong with the new SATA III sandforce drives? Im just wondering

Stability issues, freezing, BSOD, and dropping out of BIOS are the most common, SandForce has been working on this for months, they released a new Firmware update last month that helped some users, though some OCZ users that upgraded from Firmware 2.09 to 2.11 said they went from a stable system to an unstable system, OCZ is working on another Firmware update, 2.13, due out some time this month or next month.

[Flibolito]

I love my M4 128, much quicker than the X-25M and Vertex 2. Took a chance on crucial and I have fallen in love. Looking to purchase another.

[techtard]

Originally Posted by TheOne

Stability issues, freezing, BSOD, and dropping out of BIOS are the most common, SandForce has been working on this for months, they released a new Firmware update last month that helped some users, though some OCZ users that upgraded from Firmware 2.09 to 2.11 said they went from a stable system to an unstable system, OCZ is working on another Firmware update, 2.13, due out some time this month or next month.

Yeah it seems both OCZ and Sandforce are too busy pumping out new product to do proper testing & QA. It's like they are using paying customers to beta test their SSDs.

That, and the pretty sketchy bait and switch they pulled with the vertex 2 25nm are a big reason to avoid them, I think.

[farlex85]

Well looks like the m4 is the one to beat, I know I won't get the full performance w/ Sata 2 but I'll upgrade eventually and from performance charts it appears either way it'll be considerably faster than the raptor. And quieter. Thanks for the info!

[human_error]

Originally Posted by techtard

Yeah it seems both OCZ and Sandforce are too busy pumping out new product to do proper testing & QA. It's like they are using paying customers to beta test their SSDs.

That, and the pretty sketchy bait and switch they pulled with the vertex 2 25nm are a big reason to avoid them, I think.

To be fair on OCZ/corsair and sandforce the issues people are seeing point towards the sata controllers on motherboards not being able to handle the high speeds, as well as plug and play functionality thinking the SSD is unplugged when they go into a low power state to be the cause of most of the issues people see, which will vary by motherboard model (so many small factors can lead to an issue).

I'm a big fan of the corsair force series of SSDs personally, but they can be more expensive than some of the slower models.

[TheOne]

Originally Posted by human_error

To be fair on OCZ/corsair and sandforce the issues people are seeing point towards the sata controllers on motherboards not being able to handle the high speeds, as well as plug and play functionality thinking the SSD is unplugged when they go into a low power state to be the cause of most of the issues people see, which will vary by motherboard model (so many small factors can lead to an issue).

I'm a big fan of the corsair force series of SSDs personally, but they can be more expensive than some of the slower models.

The SandForce controller has issues with every controller, SATAIII and SATAII, Intel, AMD, Marvell.

Power is the key focus on trying to fix the stability problems, the OCZ Firmware update 2.11 had several power changes for their drives, there are also suggestions that have helped some users that involve power managment, the Intel LPM reg change, and a OCZ employee has suggested a reg hack that will force the first two SATA ports to be seen as internal only.

[MN12BIRD]

I love my Crucial C300 more and more each day now. It's not the fastest SSD on the block but at least it's RELIABLE! It's very similar to the newer M4 as it uses the same Micron controller IIRC and supports SATA 6.0Gbps. Any SSD is much faster than a traditional HDD and I don't care about benchmarks or numbers on a box.... reliability is WAY more important! So a Micron powered Intel or Crucial SSD is what I recommend. I just can't believe all these SF issues and I don't care who's to blame. OCZ, SandForce or the motherboard/BIOS. It doesn't matter. It should be reliable!