Most reliable SSD?

[mlah384]

I'm considering the Samsung 830 256gb or the plextor m3 pro 256gb... Plextor m3 Pro seems to perform better, how about reliability?

Thanks!

 

[mlah384]

Also, the intel 520 seems to beat them both at random write speed, which is the most noticeable performance isn't it? What's the most important speed to look at?

 

[jwilliams4200]

Neither SSD has been out long enough to have a good idea about reliability.

But what I call "trouble", which generally means infant mortality, firmware issues, or hardware incompatibility problems, is probably correlated with the percentage of below-average (1- or 2-egg) newegg reviews.

That is 3.5% for Plextor M3 and M3P combined (not enough reviews to look at just M3P), and 6.5% for Samsung 830. So it looks like Plextor M3/M3P are less likely to be troublesome than the Samsung 830 SSDs. Also, the Plextor SSDs have a 5 year warranty.

On the other hand, the Samsung 830 can usually be had for less money than the M3P, which commands a price premium.

 

[jwilliams4200]

Also, the intel 520 seems to beat them both at random write speed, which is the most noticeable performance isn't it? What's the most important speed to look at?

No, read speed, both sequential and random, is by far the most important. Random write speed is good enough on all recent SSDs that almost no one will notice the difference (unless you happen to be running some heavy writing multi-user database workload).

Sequential write speed may be important in a few applications, like video and photo editing. And there, the Plextor M3P and Samsung 830 beat Sandforce drives such as the Intel 520, since the Sandforce drives don't achieve their specified write speeds when fed incompressible data like video files and JPEGs.