Is there honestly any difference between these two SSD's?

[bryanW1995]

snip
And using Newegg reviews to rate overall drive stability over time?.. pretty funny stuff there. Regardless of what that site would say?.. it's very much fact stability and overall customer satisfaction are vastly improved from the initail release of that controller. All that needs to be done is track the mfgrs forums where the negative posts have slowed considerably. People who keep smearing and spreading fud like this are simply not doing their homework or working from the drive that they are bashing. Simple as that.

Sandforce 2281 controllers have nearly dominated the market for enthusiasts and it's been pointed out by most reviewers as well. Even the golden boy has bought into the hype lately to get a piece of that action as well. That should say something in itself as the the market viability of these controllers.

Speed sells and these SF drives are fast.. synthetically or with real data.

Newegg reviews admittedly aren't a very good comparison tool, but overall they can be useful if they corroborate other evidence. I think that all of us agree that ocz drives have had more issues over the past year than m4's or intels, so this is more just a matter of "how much worse" the ocz drives are. 4x as many failures/problems seems about right to me, though again obviously that is just a seat of the pants feel. If intel has a .6%/year failure rate, and crucial has, say, a 1% per year failure rate, then does 4% sound about right for ocz? I'd guess that it's higher, but even 4% is high enough that there will be some serious squawking going on. Personally, I think that it's likely that some/most of the ocz issues are just because users were unaware of specific quirks in the drive that they bought. But at the end of the day companies are judged by their customers, and ocz's customers are generally quite a bit less happy with their company than intel/samsung/crucial customers. Again, I'm speaking historically here, and it's entirely possible that the new everest drives will be just as reliable as intel/samsung/crucial, but we don't have enough data on these new drives yet to know for sure.

Has sandforce really "nearly dominated the market" lately? I see lots of intel 510 and 320, crucial m4's, and samsung 830's getting sold, plus ocz is now pushing their new octanes as well. And let's face it, in the vast majority of real world scenarios, even an x25m g2 is so close to a vertex 3's speed that reliability will have a much greater impact upon the user's experience than "speed". A jet plane is faster than a propeller plane, but they both look pretty fast when you're on foot.

 

[Obsoleet]

Has sandforce really "nearly dominated the market" lately? I see lots of intel 510 and 320, crucial m4's, and samsung 830's getting sold, plus ocz is now pushing their new octanes as well. And let's face it, in the vast majority of real world scenarios, even an x25m g2 is so close to a vertex 3's speed that reliability will have a much greater impact upon the user's experience than "speed". A jet plane is faster than a propeller plane, but they both look pretty fast when you're on foot.

That's exactly why I haven't upgraded yet. Though if I do, it won't be to Sandforce unless it's coming from Intel. Today the Samsung 830 is my favorite SSD (coming from an Intel user, you know I'm not brand loyal or defending my own purchases). It doesn't help that I don't have SATA6GB, but I'd upgrade my SSD anyway regardless of that.
It's not breaking a sata3gb ~300MB/sec barrier that I'm concerned with.

It's reliability, support and consistent speed. I also really appreciate the Intel SSD toolbox and only Samsung has one as well.
I was sold a few SSDs based on speed and price. Never again.

 

[groberts101]

Newegg reviews admittedly aren't a very good comparison tool, but overall they can be useful if they corroborate other evidence. I think that all of us agree that ocz drives have had more issues over the past year than m4's or intels, so this is more just a matter of "how much worse" the ocz drives are. 4x as many failures/problems seems about right to me, though again obviously that is just a seat of the pants feel. If intel has a .6%/year failure rate, and crucial has, say, a 1% per year failure rate, then does 4% sound about right for ocz? I'd guess that it's higher, but even 4% is high enough that there will be some serious squawking going on. Personally, I think that it's likely that some/most of the ocz issues are just because users were unaware of specific quirks in the drive that they bought. But at the end of the day companies are judged by their customers, and ocz's customers are generally quite a bit less happy with their company than intel/samsung/crucial customers. Again, I'm speaking historically here, and it's entirely possible that the new everest drives will be just as reliable as intel/samsung/crucial, but we don't have enough data on these new drives yet to know for sure.

Has sandforce really "nearly dominated the market" lately? I see lots of intel 510 and 320, crucial m4's, and samsung 830's getting sold, plus ocz is now pushing their new octanes as well. And let's face it, in the vast majority of real world scenarios, even an x25m g2 is so close to a vertex 3's speed that reliability will have a much greater impact upon the user's experience than "speed". A jet plane is faster than a propeller plane, but they both look pretty fast when you're on foot.

Is all pretty simplistic stuff when boiled right down. And yes, I agree that Newegg reviews can add more overview, or at least helps push towards greater research specifics due to others detail/input, and I use it myself as a piece of any purchase/puzzle I should like to figure out. BUT, I would never use it specifically(as some users seem to do more often than others) to build a case against ANY product out there as the users reviewing many supposedly "defective" products can be less than,.. let's say.. mature.. in the way that they express dissatisfaction or offer results/input to others who may be interested in that particular product. And to reduce that credibility even further?.. they all rate themselves as "experts" which only undermines the weight of their opinion. Nuff said.

Now to the main point. OK.. let's say "a company" puts a drive out with a new controller(ie; SF-2281) before anyone else does and they sell xxxx amount of drives in the first 3 months.

Simply compare the numbers of drives sold without issue compared to those who had to return, RMA or otherwise tweak power mgmt through bios updates(due to drives being seen as externally removable with hot plugging enabled by default), drivers(IME was possibly the biggest to cause issue here initially as Intel responded rather slowly to update them even though HDD's were also seeing the same exact issues on some systems), registry power mgmt tweaks, and any other workarounds possible. Now, we don't actually have these numbers but we can speculate(which is rampantly popular around this joint even without much overview or firsthand knowledge being required) that they were quite high due to such widespread negative publicity. And yes, sites like Newegg can help to add some pieces to that puzzle as well. Also seems logical and quite evident that some mfgrs with large and transparent forum environment supplied the mother lode of puzzle pieces to be added there.

So, initially the dissatisfaction rates would be quite high and paint a poor reliability picture with larger percentages of new users for those products. Now assume that they slowly get a handle on these issues?(which is fact for all mfgrs involved).. and the numbers start to change and offset the initially bad reviews. This is also fact as the critics, reviewers, and even Intel themselves have jumped into recommending/using these very same controllers.

In a nutshell here?.. it's purely perspective and the question of "where do you like to live today in regards to the current thinking on these SF-2281 controllers?" comes into play. The bleak past.. or the current much sunnier state? Pretty easy to see where the ones who've been burnt, continuously like justify why they will never buy Sandforce, chose another "better" controller, or simply like to brand bash.. are currently living. Other more informed and open minded individuals wait for the dust to settle from early issues before passing final judgment. And some of those are even going so far as to wait and see where Intel's newest version will end up before they close the dispute about whether or not SF-2281 can be made to operate without issue. Some just seem find these answers quicker than others, is all.

To dig even deeper here.. Intel literally went outside the sata 3 spec, for which they lobbied so hard to implement, while Sandforce pushed to the edge of the specs by trying to be bleeding edge in implementation of power mgmt functionality. (And BTW, Intel(and many others) simply disabled some of these feature sets in their controller's firmware to sidestep the bigger issue with drivers/bios functionality). Which of course caused issue with more than just Sandforce as even the Crucial guys were forced to come up with reg tweaks to work around freezing/stuttering issues on Marvell controllers. I know this to be fact as there were many various engineers, bios/reg hackers, and general tweakers out there who were able to successfully reduce, if not completely eliminate, more than 90%(conservative figure there) of user reported problems(for OCZ, OWC, Corsair, Patriot, and Kingston) if they were properly aimed at fixing the mish-mash of ACPI tabling issues that were proven to be the main cause of all this. Eventually Sandforce conglomerated and issued these workarounds from the firmware's end.. as it obviously should have been done in the first place. BUT.. some of those workarounds wouldn't have been possible had Intel and the various mobo mfgrs not worked on things from their end as well.

IMHO, Sandforce should bear the brunt of the responsibility/blame here as they just pass qualification down the ladder to vendors as usual and remain somewhat shielded from liability. And from there the liability obviously falls on the shoulders of those vendors who chose to go to market with less than qualified products using those very controllers as they jockied for market position to gain the most share/profit. It's exactly like a bear sticking his nose into a beehive. He fully realizes that he will get stung.. but the long-term gain far outweighs the risk. Now maybe that gamble didn't pay off in the aspect of some brands credibility ratings.. but they continued to make tons of profit from such a popular controller and in the end?.. the stockholders were happier when the quarterlies came in.

And as for Sandforce "domination"?.. well.. look at the various brands using them(SF-1xxx and SF-2xxx series) and count the numbers of models available. Now do the same for Marvell, Intel, or Samsung. Now granted.. "domination" probably isn't the best description to use here.. but "popularity" and "profit margin" may fit a bit better overall. Was really just making the point that regardless of whether you like the controller or not?.. it's VERY popular and has sold a lot of units due to that fact alone.

Sorry for such a long read here guys. I just got on a roll while seemingly trying to avoid doing the corporate books. Would much rather spend the day on the internet than work with QuickBooks. lol